Here's 'road to eternity' by Noni Chawla, a Delhi based photographer. Very humourous. There are lines that make you roll over with laughter. Enjoy!
Delhi roads teach some lessons in spirituality like nothing else can. You are lucky if you stay alive to learn.
Through millennia India has been a magnet for people in pursuit of spirituality, people who have risked life and limb, crossed oceans and mountains to come and sit at the feet of enlightened masters in the hope of attaining a higher consciousness, sometimes helped by a bit of hash or coke. The Beatles, Goldie Hawn, Julia Roberts and Richard Gere... can't all be wrong! While meditation and yoga are two of the many paths to higher consciousness, and while Delhi roads have the power to drive you over the edge literally, if you have any inclination towards spirituality, driving in Delhi has many lessons for the able student.
For starters, you are convinced that there has to be a higher force in the universe. No physical or natural law can explain why in a city with four million motor vehicles, with road users utterly lacking the self preservation instinct, or any respect for others' life or property, only four or five souls transmigrate from the streets of Delhi every day. Even the most die-hard atheist is likely to start believing there is some divine intervention.
A victim a day
Theoretically only human beings can have driving licenses. However, in Delhi, I wonder if that is true. Are Blue Line bus drivers androids or terrorists or a unique species? Painted on the outside of each bus is the legend: “Propelled by Clean Fuel”. What is not painted is: “Driven by demonic fury”. The decrepit condition of these buses would convince even a dodo that they cannot be controlled mechanically. They must be controlled through psycho kinesis. The android drivers are devoid of any human civility. Their daily prayer seems to be: “Oh Lord, give me this day my daily victim, but deliver me from prosecution!” From a spiritual perspective, this teaches you about paradoxes. Life is full of them. Probably the most recognised is the paradox of good and evil. Some human beings are good, some are evil. Most of us are somewhere in between. This is the basic stuff of life.
Some schools of spirituality believe that if you are not always stretching yourselves to the limit, then you are not evolving as human beings. Motorcyclists in Delhi are hardcore adherents of this school. Like moths, who hurl themselves into flames, they hurl themselves before cars, buses and trucks. Delhi bikers are automatically enrolled in a secret society the objectives of which include running through red lights, cutting across several lanes in front of hurtling traffic, and tempting death as frequently as possible. Like trapeze artists, their aim is to tempt fate but not let the soul separate from the body. But the eternal wheel of life necessitates that some will. Darting through traffic, hitting wing mirrors of as many cars as possible, fatalists one and all, they risk anything to gain that split second advantage. Proving the primacy of mind over matter is important for spiritual development.
Inculcating humility is essential to spiritual growth. However, if one didn't encounter arrogance how would one recognise humility? To teach us humility we have the call centre cab drivers. They are easily recognisable by their battered white Qualises, Taveras and Innovas with yellow plates, usually bearing HR and UP numbers. Most of them also fashion their looks after Bollywood villains. Unmindful of minor irritants like traffic rules, they go haring around the city scraping cars, kerbs and anything else that comes in their way. They are true spiritual masters because they put the fear of God into people.
Immutable rules
Spiritual teaching is also imparted by three-wheeler drivers. Their chariots are painted green, because they drive on CNG, an eco friendly fuel. But their friendliness is limited to their colour. They also have a secret society with some immutable rules. One, you must not drive in one lane, always straddle two. Second, you must not allow anybody to overtake you. Three, you must turn around suddenly, and frequently, in the middle of the busiest road without first looking to see if there is any traffic behind you. Four, you must drive with only one hand (the one on the accelerator) and one foot, the other one is usually tucked under your bum (a new asana?). Five, you must overcharge. Six, thou shall resist going to the destination of the passenger. Seven, you must park three or four abreast on busy roads.
Their rear view mirrors are pointed inwards towards themselves: “Know thyself”, our scriptures remind us! Their ear-shattering engines, and blaring Bollywood music, drown out all other road sounds including the warning horns of other road users. Oblivious of everything except potential passengers, they believe that what they don't see does not exist. Woe betide anybody who comes in their way. They teach us serenity. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
Remember, all of God's creatures must have equal rights on earth. India has the largest cattle population in the world, and the second largest human population. Delhi's roads are the natural habitat of both. Being both social and spiritual, our neighbourhood cows have frequent conferences, meditation and cud-chewing sessions in the middle of the busiest roads. Occasionally a cow or a buffalo will step off the kerb, from behind a bush on the road divider, just as you are driving up. If your reflexes are not as good as Schumacher's then instead of spirituality you will attain divinity (heavenly abode). The second category of pedestrians, technically members of the species homo sapiens, are only distinguishable from the four legged variety by their physical features, not by their behaviour. Both species roam the roads freely in the midst of Kafkaesque traffic and believe that the date and time of death are preordained. That is the abiding lesson for the student of spirituality.
In most countries, when going around a rotary, the rule is that the vehicle already on the rotary has the right of way. In this city of high fliers and climbers, we actively promote brinkmanship and risk taking! After all without inner strength how could we ever hope to deal with Pakistan and terrorism? So, the rule is: when you approach a rotary, you sit on the horn and the accelerator, heading for the gap which must appear magically between two vehicles. As divinely ordained, it usually does. However, sometimes the inscrutable cosmic forces are out of synch, and the gap closes. Roads littered with splintered glass bear testimony to the fact that man has still not overcome all cosmic forces. In this sport, the police set the example. After all, as law enforcers, they don't have to observe it. Gods are always above terrestrial laws. “Tu jaanta nahin mai kaun hu-n?” is a spiritual question that erring drivers often put to traffic policemen. “Who am I?” is a question all spiritual seekers ask themselves daily.
For those seeking to understand the mysteries of the universe, there is much to learn here. Somebody once defined spirituality as “the attempt to be in harmony with the unseen order of things”. In Delhi you begin to believe that there must be an unseen order in operation, and that there is harmony in chaos. The Good Book says “the meek shall inherit the earth”. We know that, no matter how powerful or agile your chariot, there is always someone more powerful or more aggressive. Drivers who want to stay healthy in Delhi take the middle path, as recommended by the Buddha. They have realised that excess of striving leads to scrapes and excess of relaxation leads to eternity.
Detachment, we have been told, is an important element of spiritual development. No matter how evolved your driving may be, some time, somewhere some dude is going to hit your beautifully maintained car. At that time, you must remember that you are not your car. You are not even your body. You are only an instrument of God. You must forgive those who know not what they do. Om Shanthi, shanthi, om!
- Noni Chawla
Showing posts with label Essay. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Essay. Show all posts
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Sunday, August 21, 2011
Gandhi's No To Satyagraha!
My note:
I'm against Anna Hazare's mode of campaign. I totally support the cause, and I am thankful for his team for having awakened our national consciousness on the issue. I'm extremely glad that the usually apathetic populace - the urban youth in particular - have risen up to the cause and is on the streets raising their voice against corruption and graft in public life.
BUT, I am staunchly against his means and methods. Personally speaking, I am disgusted by the fact that they call him and his methods 'Gandhian' and a 'second national movement for freedom'. It betrays an inexcusable ignorance about our freedom struggle and about Gandhiji's ways of doing things. Worse, it smacks of the arrogance of one who knoweth only little! To put it in a phrase, it stinks like a half baked cake!
AND, as Kapil Sibal rightly pointed out, this is an affront to the Parliament. He has lawful means for registering his protests/dissents/suggestions. Now the Bill is the property of the Parliament. He must do it in the civilised, legal manner of doing things. What he does now clearly over steps limits - this has become a kind of wanting to grab mass attention.
Clearly, I did not appoint him to speak on my behalf. I've strong reservations about what he has drafted as the 'jan' lokpal bill. These self-appointed messiahs of the 1.2 billion strong Indian population, claiming to speak their voice, should really take a second look - hey! wake up! You are going delusional!
For God's sake we're living in a DEMOCRACY - not a despotism or MOBOCRACY!!!
Okay, so I present below a very RELEVANT essay by A.G Noorani that came in last issue of Frontline Volume 28 - Issue 17 :: Aug. 13-26, 2011. A well-researched historical perspective, with razor sharp observations written in an awesome style. Particularly riveting are quotes of Ambedkar and Kennan - on civil disobedience in a democracy. Must read for all the anti-Anna Hazares and the pro-Anna Hazares. I'll try to do some highlighting to make things easier for you.
Before we begin, lets also read about A.G Noorani - in brief (this I picked up from some website)- A. G. Noorani, a secular Indian Muslim, is a lawyer and political analyst. He is is an Advocate in the Supreme Court of India and a leading Constitutional expert. His columns appear in The Hindustan Times, Frontline, Economic and Political Weekly and Dainik Bhaskar. He is the author of a number of books including: 'The Kashmir Question', 'Badruddin Tyabji Ministers' Misconduct', 'Brezhnev's Plan for Asian Security', 'The Presidential System', 'The Trial of Bhagat Singh' and 'Constitutional Questions in India'. His most recent book, as of 2003, is 'The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour' (LeftWord 2000).
{I must say I am fast becoming a fan of this man's thinking and writing}
The essay is available at Frontline's website: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20110826281704700.htm
[there you get the pictures too, which I'm too lazy to copy-paste here]
GANDHI'S NO TO SATYAGRAHA
A.G. NOORANI
The motive of civil disobedience, whatever its type, does not confer immunity for law violation.
ON November 25, 1949, as the Constituent Assembly of India completed its task, the Chairman of its Drafting Committee, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, replied to the general debate and said, “Here I could have ended. But my mind is so full of the future of our country that I feel I ought to take this occasion to give expression to some of my reflections.” What followed was a sustained, deeply felt cri de coeur:
“It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but to give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.
“If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, noncooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us” ( Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. XI, page 978).
When he made these remarks, devoted followers of Gandhi were present in the House – Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, chiefly; but none contradicted him then or later. Gandhi's programme of civil disobedience or satyagraha was seldom free from violence. K.M. Munshi wrote of the participants in the Quit India Movement: “Truth to tell, what they did was anybody's business. It was certainly not non-violent even at the start.” There was extensive disruption of communications and destruction of public property ( Pilgrimage to Freedom, Vol. I, page 83).
The scholar Neeti Nair points out that “the line between hunger fast as penance, self-purification, and a form of political protest was blurred by Gandhi himself”. In Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi defined satyagraha as a “force which is born of truth and love or non-violence”. Neeti Nair establishes that “Gandhi's understanding of satyagraha developed over the years through particular struggles conducted by himself and those who claimed to perform satyagraha in his name”. Indeed “he characterised the hunger-strikes deployed by British women suffragettes in prison in 1909, which elicited forcible feeding, as resorting to physical violence. In 1920 he was alone in his criticism of the Irish leader Terrance MacSurineg's final hunger fast.” (Neeti Nair , Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Permanent Black, 2011; pages 126-128. An extremely able work. Emphasis added, throughout.)
It is, therefore, unsafe and also unhistorical to cite the Gandhian precedent before Independence. Curiously, the debate in India more or less stops there with some fleeting references to political developments and debates in more recent years. Particularly instructive is the debate in the United States in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War.
‘Rebels without a programme'
The scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan prepared a speech for the dedication of the new library at Swarthmore College, which was published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine of January 21, 1968, under a provocative title “Rebels without a Programme”. It created a stir on university campuses and drew an unprecedented response from students and teachers. The speech, a selection of the response from campuses, some letters from “the older generation” and Kennan's reply were published in book form (George F. Kennan; Democracy and the Student Left; Hutchinson, London). Later, in May 1968, appeared a piece of incisive analysis by Justice Abe Fortas of the U.S. Supreme Court in a monograph entitled Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience (Signet Books; The New American Library). Together, these writings help a lot in addressing the issue of civil disobedience in a democracy.
Kennan wrote in his seminal article: “If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications; either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority.”
Kennan squarely met the argument that people have a right to flout the law so long as they are prepared “as a matter of conscience” to accept the punishment for the breach. “I am sorry; I cannot agree. The violation of law is not, in the moral and philosophic sense, a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it. It is not like the privilege of breaking crockery in a tent at the county fair for a quarter a shot. Respect for the law is not an obligation which is exhausted or obliterated by willingness to accept the penalty for breaking it.
“To hold otherwise would be to place the privilege of lawbreaking preferentially in the hands of the affluent, to make respect for law a commercial proposition rather than a civil duty and to deny any authority of law independent of the sanctions established against its violation.”
A graduate student at Princeton University retorted: “Contempt for the law by some of these people is a consequence of ways by which the law has made itself contemptible.” A powerful riposte come from the poet W. H. Auden: “To suggest, as Mr Kennan seems to, that the claim can never be justified is to deny that human history owes anything to its martyrs. Dr Johnson, who was certainly no anarchist, thought otherwise: ‘The magistrate has a right to enforce what he thinks, and he who is conscious of the truth has the right to suffer. I am afraid there is no other way of ascertaining the truth but by persecution on the one hand and enduring it on the other.'”
Kennan replied at length and with considerable feeling and humility: “I am free to admit that I dealt with this subject, as Mr Auden and others pointed out, much too cavalierly…. But I should think – and it was this that I meant to emphasise in my speech – that the dimensions of this problem are not quite the same where the citizen has a part in determining public policy – where the social contract may be said to prevail – as they are where the feelings of the citizen are in no wise consulted in determining the policies of the state. For a Gandhi or a Tolstoy civil disobedience was one thing; for a Thoreau – another. It seems to me that the citizen who lives under a system that assures him not only voting rights but extensive guarantees for the inviolability of his person and property and who accepts the protection of the state in the enjoyment of these rights, owes to the state at least a high measure of respect and forbearance in those instances where he may not find himself in agreement with its policies.
Defiance and lawlessness
“There is obviously a distinction to be made here between defiance by a citizen of an effort on the part of the state to make him perform specific individual actions repugnant to his own conscience and moral feeling, on the one hand, and lawlessness performed by way of protest against general laws or actions of the state conceived by the individual to be unjust, on the other.”
He did not refrain from describing his young critics in these sharp words. They are not inapplicable to some Indian “grown-ups” who have exacted much mileage in publicity in recent days. “He is the product of his national culture and his time. He reflects faithfully, but in expanded, oversized dimensions, like shadows on the wall, the bewilderments and weakness of parents, teachers, employers, moulders of opinion, leaders of government. He comes, often, from a home that is affluent yet insecure. He senses in his parents, and feels in himself, the malaise of material satiety without the balancing influence of any inner security. Imagination, fears, hopes, desires; all these are overstimulated and prematurely stimulated, by exposure to the products of the commercialised mass media [like on TV channels. Ignorant anchors who throw across seeds and invite political weathercocks to fight. They oblige readily, raucously. All in the name of debate.] Yet there are no adequate countervailing sources of strength, confidence and hope. There is no strong and coherent religious faith, no firm foundation of instruction in the nature of individual man, no appreciation for the element of tragedy that unavoidably constitutes a central component of man's predicament, and no understanding for the resulting limitations on the possibilities for social and political achievement.”
Kennan defined precisely where he differed from his student correspondents. “They would try to realise their political aspirations by direct, demonstrative pressure on the administration of the moment, bypassing the electoral and legislative process [ a la Anna Hazare]. I would consider essential to the realisation of my aspirations – and theirs too, for the matter – the creation of a new political party, a party that would differ from the two great existing ones in the fact that it would be content to remain a minority, that it would not consider itself a failure if it did not win national elections and come into power, that it would place ideas and convictions ahead of electoral success, that it would make it its business to educate others, but to do so precisely by means of a vigorous participation in the regular political and electoral process of the country.”
Justice Abe Fortas began by quoting Erich Fromm's aphorism – “Human history began with an act of disobedience, is likely to end with an act of obedience” – and proceeded at once to pose the dilemma: “If I had been a Negro living in Birmingham or Little Rock or Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, I hope I would have disobeyed the state law that said that I might not enter the public waiting room reserved for ‘Whites'. I hope I would have insisted upon going into the parks and swimming pools and schools which state or city law reserved for ‘Whites'. I hope I would have had the courage to disobey, although the segregation ordinances were declared unconstitutional. How then, can I reconcile my profound belief in obedience to law and my equally basic need to disobey these laws?”
Violation of laws as protest
Fortas drew a distinction between violation of a particularly obnoxious law and violation of laws as a protest. In the Supreme Court, he set aside the conviction of peaceful black protesters who staged a sit-in in a segregated library. They had a right to protest by “silent and reproachful presence, in a place where the protestant has every right to be.” It was a narrow victory (5-4). Such were times.
Also – and this is very relevant to our situation – he opposed demonstrations which prevented others from exercising their right to move freely. “If the demonstrators had insisted upon blocking access to the courthouse, or had entered its doors and disrupted the work going on in the courthouse in order to stage a demonstration inside or had refused to march or demonstrate in a way that allowed pedestrian or auto traffic to proceed, the result might have been different. The fact that they were engaged in a protest would not give them immunity from arrest and prosecution for their law violation. … If the right to protest, to dissent, or to assemble peaceably is exercised so as to violate valid laws reasonably designed and administered to avoid interference with others, the Constitution's guarantees will not shield the protester.”
Recalling Joan Baez's refusal to pay federal taxes which were used to finance the war in Vietnam, Fortas wrote:
“The term ‘civil disobedience' has not been limited to protests in the form of refusal to obey a law because of disapproval of that particular law. It has been applied to another kind of civil disobedience. This is the violation of laws which the protester does not challenge because of their own terms or effect. The laws themselves are not the subject of attack or protest. They are violated only as a means of protest, like carrying a picket sign. They are violated in order to publicise a protest and to bring pressure on the public or the government to accomplish purposes which have nothing to do with the law that is breached. The great exponent of this type of civil disobedience was Gandhi. He protested the British rule in India by a general programme of disobedience to the laws governing ordinary civil life….
“…The motive of civil disobedience, whatever its type, does not confer immunity for law violation. Especially if the civil disobedience involves violence or a breach of public order prohibited by statute or ordinance, it is the state's duty to arrest the dissident. If he is properly arrested, charged, and convicted, he should be punished by fine or imprisonment, or both, in accordance with the provisions of law, unless the law is invalid in general or as applied.”
A citizen cannot demand that the state obey the Constitution and the laws and at the same time assert a right to disobey the law. Fortas was among the four dissenting judges who ruled in favour of Martin Luther King, who violated a court injunction against holding a demonstration. Five judges ruled against him.
Fortas draws a distinction between demonstrations designed to register a protest and ones designed to paralyse the community – the bandh, as we call it: “They are characterised by action deliberately designed to paralyse the life of a city by disrupting traffic and the work of government and its citizens – they carry with them extreme danger. The danger of serious national consequences from massive civil disobedience may easily be exaggerated. Our nation is huge and relatively dispersed. It is highly unlikely that protesters can stage a nationwide disruption of our life, comparable to the effects of a general strike such as France and other nations have witnessed. But a programme of widespread mass civil disobedience, involving the disruption of traffic, movement of persons and supplies, and conduct of government business within any of our great cities, would put severe strains on our constitutional system.”
Fortas is not insensitive to the imperatives of one's conscience and quotes Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes' dictum: “When one's belief collides with the power of the State, the latter is supreme within its sphere. …But, in the forum of conscience, duty to a higher moral, higher power than the State has always been maintained.”
Moral issue
A person assumes an awesome responsibility when he makes such a claim. It must be a grave and intrinsically moral issue. Advocacy of a policy on legislation does not justify violation of the law on coercive fasts. In the final analysis: “The state must tolerate the individual's dissent, appropriately expressed. The individual must tolerate the majority's verdict when and as it is settled in accordance with the laws and the procedures that have been established. Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.”
But would Gandhi himself have approved of satyagraha in a free India? Evidence has come to light which suggests clearly that he would not have. Only last month this writer discovered in the invaluable treasure house of the great institution, the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) in New Delhi, a document which clinches the issue. It was the transcript of an interview in the Oral History Programme of my guru at the Bar, Purshottam Trikamdas. He was secretary to Gandhi in 1919; joint secretary of the Swaraj Party and president of the Socialist Party in 1948 before he became one of the leaders of the Supreme Court Bar. This is what he told the NMML's interviewers K.P. Rangacharya and Hari Dev Sharma on October 9, 1967: “After Gandhiji was released and we had the Poona Conference over which M.S. Aney, who was then the Acting President of the Congress, presided, I tried to meet Gandhiji but his nephew prevented me from meeting him because he knew my views to which I shall refer presently. Anyway, Aney was good enough to invite me to that meeting of Congressmen….
“I went up to Gandhiji at the end of the meeting and I said, ‘I am trying to meet you and your nephew is preventing me from meeting you.' He said, ‘No, no, nobody can do that. You come and see me.' I would like to mention that in my speech I had said, ‘I do not know what card Gandhiji had up his sleeve.' I was amused to find that some people thought this to be disrespectful because Gandhiji never played cards.
“When I went to him the next day, he showed me the letter which he had prepared for being dispatched to the Viceroy. In the letter, he had mentioned that satyagraha must be recognised as a constitutional right. So, I said to Gandhiji with utmost respect, ‘Several views have been expressed for framing our Constitution. Tomorrow, when India is free, would you say that satyagraha is a constitutional right and write it into the Constitution. And, if we do, what does it mean? It means that anybody can break the law with impunity and nothing could be done. Actually, it would be contrary to your own ideas. Satyagraha, you say, means disobeying authority and facing the consequences. Now, if satyagraha is a constitutional right and it is permitted, what are the consequences to face?' It would be said to the credit of the great man that he started thinking and he said, ‘ There is something in what you say.' Next day, he sent for me and said, ‘ You are right. I have decided not to send that letter.' Such was the greatness of the man; he always kept an open mind. After he had actually drafted the letter and finalised it, he said, ‘I am not sending it.'”
I'm against Anna Hazare's mode of campaign. I totally support the cause, and I am thankful for his team for having awakened our national consciousness on the issue. I'm extremely glad that the usually apathetic populace - the urban youth in particular - have risen up to the cause and is on the streets raising their voice against corruption and graft in public life.
BUT, I am staunchly against his means and methods. Personally speaking, I am disgusted by the fact that they call him and his methods 'Gandhian' and a 'second national movement for freedom'. It betrays an inexcusable ignorance about our freedom struggle and about Gandhiji's ways of doing things. Worse, it smacks of the arrogance of one who knoweth only little! To put it in a phrase, it stinks like a half baked cake!
AND, as Kapil Sibal rightly pointed out, this is an affront to the Parliament. He has lawful means for registering his protests/dissents/suggestions. Now the Bill is the property of the Parliament. He must do it in the civilised, legal manner of doing things. What he does now clearly over steps limits - this has become a kind of wanting to grab mass attention.
Clearly, I did not appoint him to speak on my behalf. I've strong reservations about what he has drafted as the 'jan' lokpal bill. These self-appointed messiahs of the 1.2 billion strong Indian population, claiming to speak their voice, should really take a second look - hey! wake up! You are going delusional!
For God's sake we're living in a DEMOCRACY - not a despotism or MOBOCRACY!!!
Okay, so I present below a very RELEVANT essay by A.G Noorani that came in last issue of Frontline Volume 28 - Issue 17 :: Aug. 13-26, 2011. A well-researched historical perspective, with razor sharp observations written in an awesome style. Particularly riveting are quotes of Ambedkar and Kennan - on civil disobedience in a democracy. Must read for all the anti-Anna Hazares and the pro-Anna Hazares. I'll try to do some highlighting to make things easier for you.
Before we begin, lets also read about A.G Noorani - in brief (this I picked up from some website)- A. G. Noorani, a secular Indian Muslim, is a lawyer and political analyst. He is is an Advocate in the Supreme Court of India and a leading Constitutional expert. His columns appear in The Hindustan Times, Frontline, Economic and Political Weekly and Dainik Bhaskar. He is the author of a number of books including: 'The Kashmir Question', 'Badruddin Tyabji Ministers' Misconduct', 'Brezhnev's Plan for Asian Security', 'The Presidential System', 'The Trial of Bhagat Singh' and 'Constitutional Questions in India'. His most recent book, as of 2003, is 'The RSS and the BJP: A Division of Labour' (LeftWord 2000).
{I must say I am fast becoming a fan of this man's thinking and writing}
The essay is available at Frontline's website: http://www.frontlineonnet.com/stories/20110826281704700.htm
[there you get the pictures too, which I'm too lazy to copy-paste here]
GANDHI'S NO TO SATYAGRAHA
A.G. NOORANI
The motive of civil disobedience, whatever its type, does not confer immunity for law violation.
ON November 25, 1949, as the Constituent Assembly of India completed its task, the Chairman of its Drafting Committee, Dr B.R. Ambedkar, replied to the general debate and said, “Here I could have ended. But my mind is so full of the future of our country that I feel I ought to take this occasion to give expression to some of my reflections.” What followed was a sustained, deeply felt cri de coeur:
“It is quite possible for this newborn democracy to retain its form but to give place to dictatorship in fact. If there is a landslide, the danger of the second possibility becoming actuality is much greater.
“If we wish to maintain democracy not merely in form, but also in fact, what must we do? The first thing in my judgment we must do is to hold fast to constitutional methods of achieving our social and economic objectives. It means we must abandon the bloody methods of revolution. It means that we must abandon the method of civil disobedience, noncooperation and satyagraha. When there was no way left for constitutional methods for achieving economic and social objectives, there was a great deal of justification for unconstitutional methods. But where constitutional methods are open, there can be no justification for these unconstitutional methods. These methods are nothing but the Grammar of Anarchy and the sooner they are abandoned, the better for us” ( Constituent Assembly Debates, Vol. XI, page 978).
When he made these remarks, devoted followers of Gandhi were present in the House – Jawaharlal Nehru and Vallabhbhai Patel, chiefly; but none contradicted him then or later. Gandhi's programme of civil disobedience or satyagraha was seldom free from violence. K.M. Munshi wrote of the participants in the Quit India Movement: “Truth to tell, what they did was anybody's business. It was certainly not non-violent even at the start.” There was extensive disruption of communications and destruction of public property ( Pilgrimage to Freedom, Vol. I, page 83).
The scholar Neeti Nair points out that “the line between hunger fast as penance, self-purification, and a form of political protest was blurred by Gandhi himself”. In Satyagraha in South Africa, Gandhi defined satyagraha as a “force which is born of truth and love or non-violence”. Neeti Nair establishes that “Gandhi's understanding of satyagraha developed over the years through particular struggles conducted by himself and those who claimed to perform satyagraha in his name”. Indeed “he characterised the hunger-strikes deployed by British women suffragettes in prison in 1909, which elicited forcible feeding, as resorting to physical violence. In 1920 he was alone in his criticism of the Irish leader Terrance MacSurineg's final hunger fast.” (Neeti Nair , Changing Homelands: Hindu Politics and the Partition of India, Permanent Black, 2011; pages 126-128. An extremely able work. Emphasis added, throughout.)
It is, therefore, unsafe and also unhistorical to cite the Gandhian precedent before Independence. Curiously, the debate in India more or less stops there with some fleeting references to political developments and debates in more recent years. Particularly instructive is the debate in the United States in the late 1960s during the Vietnam War.
‘Rebels without a programme'
The scholar-diplomat George F. Kennan prepared a speech for the dedication of the new library at Swarthmore College, which was published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine of January 21, 1968, under a provocative title “Rebels without a Programme”. It created a stir on university campuses and drew an unprecedented response from students and teachers. The speech, a selection of the response from campuses, some letters from “the older generation” and Kennan's reply were published in book form (George F. Kennan; Democracy and the Student Left; Hutchinson, London). Later, in May 1968, appeared a piece of incisive analysis by Justice Abe Fortas of the U.S. Supreme Court in a monograph entitled Concerning Dissent and Civil Disobedience (Signet Books; The New American Library). Together, these writings help a lot in addressing the issue of civil disobedience in a democracy.
Kennan wrote in his seminal article: “If you accept a democratic system, this means that you are prepared to put up with those of its workings, legislative or administrative, with which you do not agree as well as with those that meet with your concurrence. This willingness to accept, in principle, the workings of a system based on the will of the majority, even when you yourself are in the minority, is simply the essence of democracy. Without it there could be no system of representative self-government at all. When you attempt to alter the workings of the system by means of violence or civil disobedience, this, it seems to me, can have only one of two implications; either you do not believe in democracy at all and consider that society ought to be governed by enlightened minorities such as the one to which you, of course, belong; or you consider that the present system is so imperfect that it is not truly representative, that it no longer serves adequately as a vehicle for the will of the majority, and that this leaves to the unsatisfied no adequate means of self-expression other than the primitive one of calling attention to themselves and their emotions by mass demonstrations and mass defiance of established authority.”
Kennan squarely met the argument that people have a right to flout the law so long as they are prepared “as a matter of conscience” to accept the punishment for the breach. “I am sorry; I cannot agree. The violation of law is not, in the moral and philosophic sense, a privilege that lies offered for sale with a given price tag, like an object in a supermarket, available to anyone who has the price and is willing to pay for it. It is not like the privilege of breaking crockery in a tent at the county fair for a quarter a shot. Respect for the law is not an obligation which is exhausted or obliterated by willingness to accept the penalty for breaking it.
“To hold otherwise would be to place the privilege of lawbreaking preferentially in the hands of the affluent, to make respect for law a commercial proposition rather than a civil duty and to deny any authority of law independent of the sanctions established against its violation.”
A graduate student at Princeton University retorted: “Contempt for the law by some of these people is a consequence of ways by which the law has made itself contemptible.” A powerful riposte come from the poet W. H. Auden: “To suggest, as Mr Kennan seems to, that the claim can never be justified is to deny that human history owes anything to its martyrs. Dr Johnson, who was certainly no anarchist, thought otherwise: ‘The magistrate has a right to enforce what he thinks, and he who is conscious of the truth has the right to suffer. I am afraid there is no other way of ascertaining the truth but by persecution on the one hand and enduring it on the other.'”
Kennan replied at length and with considerable feeling and humility: “I am free to admit that I dealt with this subject, as Mr Auden and others pointed out, much too cavalierly…. But I should think – and it was this that I meant to emphasise in my speech – that the dimensions of this problem are not quite the same where the citizen has a part in determining public policy – where the social contract may be said to prevail – as they are where the feelings of the citizen are in no wise consulted in determining the policies of the state. For a Gandhi or a Tolstoy civil disobedience was one thing; for a Thoreau – another. It seems to me that the citizen who lives under a system that assures him not only voting rights but extensive guarantees for the inviolability of his person and property and who accepts the protection of the state in the enjoyment of these rights, owes to the state at least a high measure of respect and forbearance in those instances where he may not find himself in agreement with its policies.
Defiance and lawlessness
“There is obviously a distinction to be made here between defiance by a citizen of an effort on the part of the state to make him perform specific individual actions repugnant to his own conscience and moral feeling, on the one hand, and lawlessness performed by way of protest against general laws or actions of the state conceived by the individual to be unjust, on the other.”
He did not refrain from describing his young critics in these sharp words. They are not inapplicable to some Indian “grown-ups” who have exacted much mileage in publicity in recent days. “He is the product of his national culture and his time. He reflects faithfully, but in expanded, oversized dimensions, like shadows on the wall, the bewilderments and weakness of parents, teachers, employers, moulders of opinion, leaders of government. He comes, often, from a home that is affluent yet insecure. He senses in his parents, and feels in himself, the malaise of material satiety without the balancing influence of any inner security. Imagination, fears, hopes, desires; all these are overstimulated and prematurely stimulated, by exposure to the products of the commercialised mass media [like on TV channels. Ignorant anchors who throw across seeds and invite political weathercocks to fight. They oblige readily, raucously. All in the name of debate.] Yet there are no adequate countervailing sources of strength, confidence and hope. There is no strong and coherent religious faith, no firm foundation of instruction in the nature of individual man, no appreciation for the element of tragedy that unavoidably constitutes a central component of man's predicament, and no understanding for the resulting limitations on the possibilities for social and political achievement.”
Kennan defined precisely where he differed from his student correspondents. “They would try to realise their political aspirations by direct, demonstrative pressure on the administration of the moment, bypassing the electoral and legislative process [ a la Anna Hazare]. I would consider essential to the realisation of my aspirations – and theirs too, for the matter – the creation of a new political party, a party that would differ from the two great existing ones in the fact that it would be content to remain a minority, that it would not consider itself a failure if it did not win national elections and come into power, that it would place ideas and convictions ahead of electoral success, that it would make it its business to educate others, but to do so precisely by means of a vigorous participation in the regular political and electoral process of the country.”
Justice Abe Fortas began by quoting Erich Fromm's aphorism – “Human history began with an act of disobedience, is likely to end with an act of obedience” – and proceeded at once to pose the dilemma: “If I had been a Negro living in Birmingham or Little Rock or Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, I hope I would have disobeyed the state law that said that I might not enter the public waiting room reserved for ‘Whites'. I hope I would have insisted upon going into the parks and swimming pools and schools which state or city law reserved for ‘Whites'. I hope I would have had the courage to disobey, although the segregation ordinances were declared unconstitutional. How then, can I reconcile my profound belief in obedience to law and my equally basic need to disobey these laws?”
Violation of laws as protest
Fortas drew a distinction between violation of a particularly obnoxious law and violation of laws as a protest. In the Supreme Court, he set aside the conviction of peaceful black protesters who staged a sit-in in a segregated library. They had a right to protest by “silent and reproachful presence, in a place where the protestant has every right to be.” It was a narrow victory (5-4). Such were times.
Also – and this is very relevant to our situation – he opposed demonstrations which prevented others from exercising their right to move freely. “If the demonstrators had insisted upon blocking access to the courthouse, or had entered its doors and disrupted the work going on in the courthouse in order to stage a demonstration inside or had refused to march or demonstrate in a way that allowed pedestrian or auto traffic to proceed, the result might have been different. The fact that they were engaged in a protest would not give them immunity from arrest and prosecution for their law violation. … If the right to protest, to dissent, or to assemble peaceably is exercised so as to violate valid laws reasonably designed and administered to avoid interference with others, the Constitution's guarantees will not shield the protester.”
Recalling Joan Baez's refusal to pay federal taxes which were used to finance the war in Vietnam, Fortas wrote:
“The term ‘civil disobedience' has not been limited to protests in the form of refusal to obey a law because of disapproval of that particular law. It has been applied to another kind of civil disobedience. This is the violation of laws which the protester does not challenge because of their own terms or effect. The laws themselves are not the subject of attack or protest. They are violated only as a means of protest, like carrying a picket sign. They are violated in order to publicise a protest and to bring pressure on the public or the government to accomplish purposes which have nothing to do with the law that is breached. The great exponent of this type of civil disobedience was Gandhi. He protested the British rule in India by a general programme of disobedience to the laws governing ordinary civil life….
“…The motive of civil disobedience, whatever its type, does not confer immunity for law violation. Especially if the civil disobedience involves violence or a breach of public order prohibited by statute or ordinance, it is the state's duty to arrest the dissident. If he is properly arrested, charged, and convicted, he should be punished by fine or imprisonment, or both, in accordance with the provisions of law, unless the law is invalid in general or as applied.”
A citizen cannot demand that the state obey the Constitution and the laws and at the same time assert a right to disobey the law. Fortas was among the four dissenting judges who ruled in favour of Martin Luther King, who violated a court injunction against holding a demonstration. Five judges ruled against him.
Fortas draws a distinction between demonstrations designed to register a protest and ones designed to paralyse the community – the bandh, as we call it: “They are characterised by action deliberately designed to paralyse the life of a city by disrupting traffic and the work of government and its citizens – they carry with them extreme danger. The danger of serious national consequences from massive civil disobedience may easily be exaggerated. Our nation is huge and relatively dispersed. It is highly unlikely that protesters can stage a nationwide disruption of our life, comparable to the effects of a general strike such as France and other nations have witnessed. But a programme of widespread mass civil disobedience, involving the disruption of traffic, movement of persons and supplies, and conduct of government business within any of our great cities, would put severe strains on our constitutional system.”
Fortas is not insensitive to the imperatives of one's conscience and quotes Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes' dictum: “When one's belief collides with the power of the State, the latter is supreme within its sphere. …But, in the forum of conscience, duty to a higher moral, higher power than the State has always been maintained.”
Moral issue
A person assumes an awesome responsibility when he makes such a claim. It must be a grave and intrinsically moral issue. Advocacy of a policy on legislation does not justify violation of the law on coercive fasts. In the final analysis: “The state must tolerate the individual's dissent, appropriately expressed. The individual must tolerate the majority's verdict when and as it is settled in accordance with the laws and the procedures that have been established. Dissent and dissenters have no monopoly on freedom. They must tolerate opposition. They must accept dissent from their dissent.”
But would Gandhi himself have approved of satyagraha in a free India? Evidence has come to light which suggests clearly that he would not have. Only last month this writer discovered in the invaluable treasure house of the great institution, the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library (NMML) in New Delhi, a document which clinches the issue. It was the transcript of an interview in the Oral History Programme of my guru at the Bar, Purshottam Trikamdas. He was secretary to Gandhi in 1919; joint secretary of the Swaraj Party and president of the Socialist Party in 1948 before he became one of the leaders of the Supreme Court Bar. This is what he told the NMML's interviewers K.P. Rangacharya and Hari Dev Sharma on October 9, 1967: “After Gandhiji was released and we had the Poona Conference over which M.S. Aney, who was then the Acting President of the Congress, presided, I tried to meet Gandhiji but his nephew prevented me from meeting him because he knew my views to which I shall refer presently. Anyway, Aney was good enough to invite me to that meeting of Congressmen….
“I went up to Gandhiji at the end of the meeting and I said, ‘I am trying to meet you and your nephew is preventing me from meeting you.' He said, ‘No, no, nobody can do that. You come and see me.' I would like to mention that in my speech I had said, ‘I do not know what card Gandhiji had up his sleeve.' I was amused to find that some people thought this to be disrespectful because Gandhiji never played cards.
“When I went to him the next day, he showed me the letter which he had prepared for being dispatched to the Viceroy. In the letter, he had mentioned that satyagraha must be recognised as a constitutional right. So, I said to Gandhiji with utmost respect, ‘Several views have been expressed for framing our Constitution. Tomorrow, when India is free, would you say that satyagraha is a constitutional right and write it into the Constitution. And, if we do, what does it mean? It means that anybody can break the law with impunity and nothing could be done. Actually, it would be contrary to your own ideas. Satyagraha, you say, means disobeying authority and facing the consequences. Now, if satyagraha is a constitutional right and it is permitted, what are the consequences to face?' It would be said to the credit of the great man that he started thinking and he said, ‘ There is something in what you say.' Next day, he sent for me and said, ‘ You are right. I have decided not to send that letter.' Such was the greatness of the man; he always kept an open mind. After he had actually drafted the letter and finalised it, he said, ‘I am not sending it.'”
Monday, August 15, 2011
Some Thoughts on the Common Toad
George Orwell's Some Thoughts on the Common Toad!
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the
snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own
fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain
buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible
towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something--some kind of
shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the
temperature--has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads
appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time--
at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently
well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look,
like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are
languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes
look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at
another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living
creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured
semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I
think is called a chrysoberyl.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on
building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has
swollen to his normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of
intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he
wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or
even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a
long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes
upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the
water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees,
however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly
sitting on the female's back. You can now distinguish males from females,
because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms
tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a day or two the spawn is
laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and
soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with
masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then
forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the
summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but
perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game
anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of
spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the
skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I
am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am
not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an
interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the
cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring
are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid
street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,
if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green
of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how
Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of
London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I
have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.
There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds
living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought
that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of
England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere,
like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The
spring is commonly referred to as "a miracle", and during the past five
or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of
life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the
spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and
harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February
since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to
be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead
at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle
happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in
the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are
thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers
are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of
blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the
sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the
air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last
September.
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To
put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all
groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the
capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living
because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some
other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what
the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not
doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable
reference to "Nature" in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive
letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually
"sentimental", two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any
pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political
quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it
is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment
of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of
machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its
domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.
This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a
foible of urbanized people who have no notion what Nature is really like.
Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love
the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers,
except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one
must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the
warmer times of year.
This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance,
including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm
for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and
Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.
The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we
ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making
the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual
process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a
man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a
labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine
will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political
problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more
complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first
primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating
an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's
childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and--to
return to my first instance--toads, one makes a peaceful and decent
future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that
nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a
little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus
energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you
enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I
stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match
in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you
are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a
holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the
factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are
streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the
sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they
disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
Before the swallow, before the daffodil, and not much later than the
snowdrop, the common toad salutes the coming of spring after his own
fashion, which is to emerge from a hole in the ground, where he has lain
buried since the previous autumn, and crawl as rapidly as possible
towards the nearest suitable patch of water. Something--some kind of
shudder in the earth, or perhaps merely a rise of a few degrees in the
temperature--has told him that it is time to wake up: though a few toads
appear to sleep the clock round and miss out a year from time to time--
at any rate, I have more than once dug them up, alive and apparently
well, in the middle of the summer.
At this period, after his long fast, the toad has a very spiritual look,
like a strict Anglo-Catholic towards the end of Lent. His movements are
languid but purposeful, his body is shrunken, and by contrast his eyes
look abnormally large. This allows one to notice, what one might not at
another time, that a toad has about the most beautiful eye of any living
creature. It is like gold, or more exactly it is like the golden-coloured
semi-precious stone which one sometimes sees in signet-rings, and which I
think is called a chrysoberyl.
For a few days after getting into the water the toad concentrates on
building up his strength by eating small insects. Presently he has
swollen to his normal size again, and then he hoes through a phase of
intense sexiness. All he knows, at least if he is a male toad, is that he
wants to get his arms round something, and if you offer him a stick, or
even your finger, he will cling to it with surprising strength and take a
long time to discover that it is not a female toad. Frequently one comes
upon shapeless masses of ten or twenty toads rolling over and over in the
water, one clinging to another without distinction of sex. By degrees,
however, they sort themselves out into couples, with the male duly
sitting on the female's back. You can now distinguish males from females,
because the male is smaller, darker and sits on top, with his arms
tightly clasped round the female's neck. After a day or two the spawn is
laid in long strings which wind themselves in and out of the reeds and
soon become invisible. A few more weeks, and the water is alive with
masses of tiny tadpoles which rapidly grow larger, sprout hind-legs, then
forelegs, then shed their tails: and finally, about the middle of the
summer, the new generation of toads, smaller than one's thumb-nail but
perfect in every particular, crawl out of the water to begin the game
anew.
I mention the spawning of the toads because it is one of the phenomena of
spring which most deeply appeal to me, and because the toad, unlike the
skylark and the primrose, has never had much of a boost from poets. But I
am aware that many people do not like reptiles or amphibians, and I am
not suggesting that in order to enjoy the spring you have to take an
interest in toads. There are also the crocus, the missel-thrush, the
cuckoo, the blackthorn, etc. The point is that the pleasures of spring
are available to everybody, and cost nothing. Even in the most sordid
street the coming of spring will register itself by some sign or other,
if it is only a brighter blue between the chimney pots or the vivid green
of an elder sprouting on a blitzed site. Indeed it is remarkable how
Nature goes on existing unofficially, as it were, in the very heart of
London. I have seen a kestrel flying over the Deptford gasworks, and I
have heard a first-rate performance by a blackbird in the Euston Road.
There must be some hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of birds
living inside the four-mile radius, and it is rather a pleasing thought
that none of them pays a halfpenny of rent.
As for spring, not even the narrow and gloomy streets round the Bank of
England are quite able to exclude it. It comes seeping in everywhere,
like one of those new poison gases which pass through all filters. The
spring is commonly referred to as "a miracle", and during the past five
or six years this worn-out figure of speech has taken on a new lease of
life. After the sorts of winters we have had to endure recently, the
spring does seem miraculous, because it has become gradually harder and
harder to believe that it is actually going to happen. Every February
since 1940 I have found myself thinking that this time winter is going to
be permanent. But Persephone, like the toads, always rises from the dead
at about the same moment. Suddenly, towards the end of March, the miracle
happens and the decaying slum in which I live is transfigured. Down in
the square the sooty privets have turned bright green, the leaves are
thickening on the chestnut trees, the daffodils are out, the wallflowers
are budding, the policeman's tunic looks positively a pleasant shade of
blue, the fishmonger greets his customers with a smile, and even the
sparrows are quite a different colour, having felt the balminess of the
air and nerved themselves to take a bath, their first since last
September.
Is it wicked to take a pleasure in spring and other seasonal changes? To
put it more precisely, is it politically reprehensible, while we are all
groaning, or at any rate ought to be groaning, under the shackles of the
capitalist system, to point out that life is frequently more worth living
because of a blackbird's song, a yellow elm tree in October, or some
other natural phenomenon which does not cost money and does not have what
the editors of left-wing newspapers call a class angle? There is not
doubt that many people think so. I know by experience that a favourable
reference to "Nature" in one of my articles is liable to bring me abusive
letters, and though the key-word in these letters is usually
"sentimental", two ideas seem to be mixed up in them. One is that any
pleasure in the actual process of life encourages a sort of political
quietism. People, so the thought runs, ought to be discontented, and it
is our job to multiply our wants and not simply to increase our enjoyment
of the things we have already. The other idea is that this is the age of
machines and that to dislike the machine, or even to want to limit its
domination, is backward-looking, reactionary and slightly ridiculous.
This is often backed up by the statement that a love of Nature is a
foible of urbanized people who have no notion what Nature is really like.
Those who really have to deal with the soil, so it is argued, do not love
the soil, and do not take the faintest interest in birds or flowers,
except from a strictly utilitarian point of view. To love the country one
must live in the town, merely taking an occasional week-end ramble at the
warmer times of year.
This last idea is demonstrably false. Medieval literature, for instance,
including the popular ballads, is full of an almost Georgian enthusiasm
for Nature, and the art of agricultural peoples such as the Chinese and
Japanese centre always round trees, birds, flowers, rivers, mountains.
The other idea seems to me to be wrong in a subtler way. Certainly we
ought to be discontented, we ought not simply to find out ways of making
the best of a bad job, and yet if we kill all pleasure in the actual
process of life, what sort of future are we preparing for ourselves? If a
man cannot enjoy the return of spring, why should he be happy in a
labour-saving Utopia? What will he do with the leisure that the machine
will give him? I have always suspected that if our economic and political
problems are ever really solved, life will become simpler instead of more
complex, and that the sort of pleasure one gets from finding the first
primrose will loom larger than the sort of pleasure one gets from eating
an ice to the tune of a Wurlitzer. I think that by retaining one's
childhood love of such things as trees, fishes, butterflies and--to
return to my first instance--toads, one makes a peaceful and decent
future a little more probable, and that by preaching the doctrine that
nothing is to be admired except steel and concrete, one merely makes it a
little surer that human beings will have no outlet for their surplus
energy except in hatred and leader worship.
At any rate, spring is here, even in London N.1, and they can't stop you
enjoying it. This is a satisfying reflection. How many a time have I
stood watching the toads mating, or a pair of hares having a boxing match
in the young corn, and thought of all the important persons who as you
are not actually ill, hungry, frightened or immured in a prison or a
holiday camp, spring is still spring. The atom bombs are piling up in the
factories, the police are prowling through the cities, the lies are
streaming from the loudspeakers, but the earth is still going round the
sun, and neither the dictators nor the bureaucrats, deeply as they
disapprove of the process, are able to prevent it.
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