Contextual editorial illustration for the restored article.
The recent controversy on Art of Living event called World Culture Festival can be added to the bucket list of attempts to shower controversy on each and every Hindu event. It is a plain and simple case of media and leftist hitjob to challenge this event on environmental grounds when NGT stays quiet on grave environmental issues. The Yamuna bed was not only used to construct a big DTC bus depot during the last Commonwealth games but also hosts the Yamuna Bank metro station — not to forget the large number of illegal squatters on its floodplain. Given such huge transgressions, it is difficult to comprehend how a temporary event could have caused irreparable damage.
A large section of Yamuna floodbank is captured by land sharks right under the nose of NGT, which finally woke up from slumber but it was too late and the damage was done. WCF like event is not planned in a day and must have requested permission much before the inauguration, so it is highly unlikely that environmental considerations were not scrutinised beforehand. Since the issue came into highlight right before its inauguration, it gives a clear indication of ill-will on the part of NGT.
Also, given everything else being equal, finally NGT imposed a Rs. 5 crore environmental penalty. The question is — shouldn’t NGT have imposed this tax much before the event rather than use it as a stick to beat down Sri Sri? After all, neither AOL was building a permanent structure on the flood banks nor planning to stay there forever — unlike in the case of the DTC bus depot post Commonwealth games. The hypocrisy becomes even more intolerable after realising that for all practical purposes, Yamuna just represents a fancy drain now since Delhi hardly thinks twice before dumping its sewage into it. The real course of action should have been to levy an environmental tax on Art of Living depending on the cost to clean up the river post event.
Having understood the ulterior motives behind this hitjob, it now brings us to understand the support of this event by the supposedly self-proclaimed RW in India. Most of them are actually economic libertarians without much regard for cultural Hindu nationalism. It is in controversies like WCF that the true affiliations of the economic RW come out. This became amply clear by reading a piece by R. Jagannathan in SwarajyaMag — the magazine which carries “Read India Right” on its logo.
The crux of the argument presented by R. Jagannathan is as follows:
The annual Haj, where millions of devout Muslims travel from all over the world to congregate in Mecca, is probably the single biggest cause of religion-induced damage in the world in an ecologically sensitive desert zone. Our Kumbh Melas, Ardh Kumbhs and various spiritual congregations in many temples and fairs too do enormous damage. For example, the Hindu ritual of cremating our dead on the banks of the Ganga and immersion of our ashes in various rivers and seas is another factor in this ecological crisis.
Does this look any different from the leftists who raise the Dalit bogey while talking about any issue under the sky? Here Jagannathan also uses a similar template to mildly bash Hindu rituals by giving a small slap on the wrist of Hajj pilgrims in his first paragraph. This is not much different than PK putting up one or two offending scenes on Muslims and Christians while bashing Hindu rituals in the rest of the movie. By mentioning Muslims and Hajj, this piece too ticks the box to claim neutrality. It becomes amply clear later when the article says:
It is time to show that same creativity now by converting our cremation and other ceremonies to symbolic events with limited human damage to our rivers and the air.
It is highly non-scientific to blame cremation ashes as an environmental concern when most of the rivers are polluted by tanneries and other industries which dump massive chemicals into them, making them not only carcinogenic but also depleting precious oxygen content to kill all kinds of flora and fauna. All rivers in India are equally or more polluted than the Ganga, even those that do not have the same spiritual significance and hence no cremation dumping. It would have been sensible for him to ask for better checks and balances such as not dumping half-burned bodies into the river. But he took a typical liberal stand and demanded to change the whole rituals to suit the agenda of the new environmental fundamentalists. There is no reason to not believe that given human intelligence and efforts, the rituals cannot be done in an ecologically sensitive way. Sadly, the fact that rituals nurture a society is beyond the grasp of our self-proclaimed libertarians. The death of Hindu rituals will only mean the death of the civilization. This is very well known by the leftists and hence they carry out such hitjobs to kill the rituals to soften Hindus and de-racinate them — making them easy targets for western propaganda and evangelists. If you analyse carefully, it is the same underlying agenda which runs from the Jallikattu ban to the current controversy. Environmental fundamentalism is a new addition to the list of tricks being employed to kill rituals, and the economic RW is more than a willing accomplice in helping this agenda.
So what should be the message of Hindu RW to R. Jagannathan and his friends? Thank you guys, we understand the damage done to India by the socialist economic policies of Congress and we like your economic prescriptions. But if there is a clash between economic libertarianism and culture, Hindus will stick to their cultural roots. Economic progress by cutting down the Dharmic roots will be too big a cost for modernity.
The below picture from Adarsh Liberal perfectly sums up the leftist agenda to de-racinate Hindus — the question is should we now add R. Jagannathan to this list?
An Adarsh Liberal Hindu Festivals Calendar
— Adarsh Liberal (@AdarshLiberal), January 13, 2016
Originally published March 10, 2016 on Yuga Parivartan.
Editorial illustration for “Why Hindus need to infiltrate mass media”.
One can charge Rajiv Gandhi with the usual stupidity and naivety that is now being associated with the Gandhi-Nehru family, but there is at least one action which should be credited to the then young Prime Minister of India. What did he do that now sets him apart from other Gandhi family members? It was not bringing computers to India as they would have arrived sooner or later. But it was the fact that he allowed screening of Ramayana on Doordarshan in 1987 to help propagate cultural values among Indians. Whether Rajiv Gandhi himself pioneered this Hindu revival is questionable given that his government first appeased Muslims in the Shah Bano case and only later turned to Hindu appeasement.
But Rajiv Gandhi is not important for this article. What is rather important is to understand the role of mass media in defining cultural values. No amount of public education or newspapers had achieved what Ramayana and Mahabharata achieved through one hour telecast every week for a few years. It rekindled a new life in the Hindu soul that was devastated from the slavery of past centuries. Not only did BJP — a non-Muslim-appeasing party — ride to power on this new Hindu renaissance, but it also led to bringing down of Babri Masjid and changing the passive Hindu bania image for some time. It was very well reflected in the opposition by the leftists who were taken aback by the popularity of these serials. The reaction of the then Director General of Doordarshan, Bhaskar Ghose — a leftist — makes it amply clear:
There was far too much ritual and not nearly enough story. He (Sagar) had used the worst extras he could get, because he was doing it on the cheap.
— Bhaskar Ghose, then Director General of Doordarshan
The leftists are masters at propaganda and know very well the importance of rituals in upholding cultural unity. Bhaskar Ghose — the father of Sagarika Ghose — tried every possible way to kill Ramayana halfway, but sadly for him the mass hysteria around Ramayana had grown out of control by then and was untameable by any official writ. The position of these epics in the Hindu psyche was further cemented by Mahabharat, which aired after Ramayana in 1988.
But why are these events from three decades ago relevant today? They are relevant because even though we have seen the rise of social media, most thoughts are still seeded by the culture as depicted in mass media. The left understands this well and has its foot-soldiers placed in all the high echelons of power. The outrage against appointing Gajendra Chauhan as chairman of FTII (Film and Television Institute) should be seen under this light. Although his appointment like any other appointment can be debated, the high-decibel campaign that was unleashed on him can only be explained by the heartburn of career leftists.
While Hindus are becoming increasingly assertive of their identity and the rise of Rajiv Malhotra and other scholars has given them the required intellectual firepower to support the Hindu cause, mass-media infiltration is going on at a snail’s pace. Intellectual discourse is very important but one can only disregard the influence of mass media at his own peril. Hindus had assertive scholars like Sitaram Goel and Arun Shourie even during the dark ages of early Congress rule, but Ramayana and Mahabharata played a much bigger role in awakening Hindus and building a consolidated Hindu voting bloc for the first time in India. Intellectual discussion will fail to realise its objectives unless it achieves active domination over mass media.
The domination of popular culture is not only important from the point of achieving current political objectives but also to create a sense of cultural unity and prepare future leaders. Popular culture created by mass media is the stepping stone towards developing an ecosystem which will then generate the next generation of pro-Hindu intellectuals. The role of Amar Chitra Katha and Panchatantra stories has been paramount in helping many grown-up Hindus to rediscover their roots after being brainwashed by leftist school books for years. The closest current example of such an effort to capture young minds is the animated series Chota Bheem, whose character is partially lifted from Bheem of the Mahabharata. India has an abundant treasure trove of literature to dig into, but the only problem is that this potential for generating popular mass media has not yet been exploited. Also, unlike Abrahamic religions, Hinduism does not sell victimhood and has many positive stories to tell — many superheroes who would give Batman and Superman a run for their money.
After having understood the benefits of infiltrating mass media, the only analysis that remains is to look at the current state of Hindu representation in mass media. While on the intellectual front one can boast about Rajiv Malhotra as one of the guiding forces, there are hardly any popular figures to recount on the mass media front. There are many right-leaning media personnel but most of them restrict themselves to economic libertarianism without much sympathy for Hindu identity. Zee News has finally started to push an alternate narrative on the news front but it is almost impossible to find pro-Hindu voices in the movie industry.
Anupam Kher is making a lot of noise lately but he plays by the rules of the left and does not command the same fan following as the Khans. Given the complete dominance of the Khans in Bollywood for the last two decades, does it come as a surprise that Hindus are forced to gulp down the insults to Hindu icons as in PK? The chanting of pro-Azadi slogans in JNU is the manifestation of this loose control that Hindus have had over the Muslim-left dominated popular culture, as amply demonstrated through movies like Haider. Bollywood is often called the national movie industry — but doesn’t it shock you that it hardly brings out any movies that can build national image or cement cultural identity? The stories about our martyrs are on an ignore list while the industry keeps pumping out inane trash glorifying mafias. Also, it is impossible to ignore the demographic damage done by the Khans as they have more or less succeeded in portraying the harmless nice Muslim guy image in popular culture, making girls swoon over Muslim men and become susceptible to love jihad.
So what is the way forward? Well, burning down theatres showing Haider or boycotting Dangal are only short-term measures. The real way forward is shown by S.S. Rajamouli through his epic Baahubali. There is no other recent movie which has portrayed Hinduism in such glory. Given how well it did on the Hindi box office despite being a Telugu movie clearly shows that people are fed up of watching old midgets sold as heroes by Bollywood. If Hindus need to mainstream their culture and make it cool, they need to get their hands dirty and churn out people of all artistic hues. They need more Rajamoulis as well as more Amish Tripathis. This movement which has been building up unconsciously for too long should be pursued at a much faster pace and given some covert state patronage. There is no reason to stop and get contented just by erasing the left agenda from school books. PM Modi — are you listening?
Editorial illustration for “The Anarchist Kejriwal: Swaraj review”.
Kejriwal, the demagogue, has left enough traces of his thought process in his short political career. He has evolved into a complete charlatan now when compared to his old days as side-kick of Anna Hazare. So it becomes super important to understand his thought process before he became the current megalomaniac — as reflected by his actions to publish full-page ads of his non-achievements in the glorious municipality of Delhi in local newspapers from around the country.
Kejriwal offered a glimpse of his thought process in the book called “Swarajya” that he published during his activist days. It is difficult to miss the naivety of the solutions offered by this technocrat. But it should not be a surprise, given his mediocre performance as a student at IIT. Although it is contested that he plagiarised the book from another author, since he did not mind publishing it in his name, we would take it as a reflection of his thought process on various issues.
1) He raises some important questions and narrows his focus on two:
Decentralization
Citizen control over everything
2) While the questions seem fine, the prescriptions are repetitive and a rehash of leftist ideology mixed with Gandhian utopia. So where does the book fail?
Belief in the greatness of the super awesome village panchayats
Distrusting each and every corporate action as if they are the only culprits — anti-capitalism in all forms
Back to Gandhi’s idea of self-sufficient villages. In the beginning of the book, he highlights that villages should decide where they want to spend money rather than the centre and state government earmarking expenditure for various schemes like MNREGA, food security etc. Later he argues for giving even tax collection authority to the villages as well as decision on how to spend their funds.
This last point on self-sufficient communities is the crux of his book. But it raises fundamental questions:
Are villages really an idealistic pinnacle that we should strive for? How would such a system take care of the “tragedy of the commons” problem?
Would such a decentralized system build a modern India capable of taking on its numerous adversaries?
Do we need a society with well-defined impersonal rules where things take care of themselves, or a system where villages and RWAs need to meet every week and vote on every trivial or big issue?
Should we replace our one Constitution with thousands of constitutions specific to each community?
India definitely needs rapid industrialization to bring people out of poverty. How would one achieve this with such a super-slow decision-making process in such a fragmented polity?
It is this last belief in anarchy that Kejriwal still carries around despite his numerous U-turns. Does it surprise you that he gave political space to Prashant Bhushan despite knowing his pro-militant stance on Kashmir? His support for Kanhaiya and Omar Khalid also highlights the same line of approach that he mentioned some years ago in his book.
Now coming to the final point. Does it make a good read? Definitely not — and specifically if you are planning to spend your money on it. It is just a rehash of old bankrupt ideologies. He was not even creative with the name and copied it from Mahatma Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj! But it is still important to know that Kejriwal had a bucket full of failed ideas about developing India even before he embarked on his political career. Now, coupled with his political ambitions, these ideas have become suicidal and get amply reflected in his support for extremists and secessionists in all states.
Verdict: Not worth your money. Read it for free if you must, to understand the anarchist mind behind the muffler and slipper.
Editorial illustration for “White Accountability”.
Originally published at Amerika.org and republished here with permission.
As more people cast around various scapegoats in an attempt to explain how the West has fallen from the world’s premiere society to a laughable backwater, it is time to take responsibility and point the finger at the actual cause of our misery.
It is not The Jews, The Rich, or The Government (although that did not help). It is not corporate personhood or the fact that our democracy is not direct. Nor is it even the GOP, although they did not help either. We need to peel back all the layers and look to the core.
Our candidates are liars because democracy rewards lies. They offer a product which might be described as the illusion of peace of mind. This consists of a promise of a solution to some basic problem, a scapegoat to blame for the wider systemic failures, and a reason to consider yourself smarter or nicer than people who oppose this idea.
Leftists are the masters at this. They look at a ruined society and say that clearly the problem is that some have more than others. To support this they show you people suffering, counting on you to worry about what would happen to you in that situation. Then they trot out the studies that consider one factor out of ten thousand and use that to rationalize blame on a scapegoat. Then they say that only mean people could oppose this.
The GOP Establishment (GOPE) has another policy. It lets you know that liberals are insane and PC is bad, and then brings out the old familiars from the Reagan era: defense, Israel, the Bible and maybe even some outrage at abortion. They then say that only morally bad people would not want these things.
In either case, the audience is being manipulated like bulls at a bullfight, with one crucial exception: the audience wants it. They want to purchase peace of mind, and that requires simplistic solutions and blame, and then a reason to feel good even if they lose by calling the other team a bunch of weenies, moochers, meanies or incompetents. That raises the hands and gets the candidate into office.
Once in office, the candidate guffaws. In this system of checks and balances, made exponentially more powerful by two centuries of attempts to fix it, nothing can be done. The direction will not change; the question is only what flavor of compromise. So he goes back to the voters and blames the scapegoat again, but promises to try even harder next time, and the cycle restarts.
White accountability begins when we recognize that our problem has always been an internal war. Most people are bad; like our Simian forebears, they cannot control their urges, and one of those urges is the desire to tear down those above them. They form mass mobs and demand power, at which point the limitations of their abilities are revealed. But the first error was the crucial one, which is demanding that people who cannot make leadership decisions be called on to vote on those decisions.
Out of a hundred people, one is a natural leader with the mental capacity and moral character to see a complex thought through to its conclusion. The rest can fix cars, program computers, draw anime, etc., but that is because these tasks are narrowly framed. They do not have what leadership decisions require, which is a high tolerance for ambiguity when fitting thousands of details into a big, top-down picture.
White internal warfare has marked this country since its inception. The 1% who knew anything wanted to keep the franchise small, but the herd wanted power to make itself feel important. Its first gambit was to import lots of non-Western Europeans, all of whom tend to vote Left-leaning. At that point, it began systematically dismantling any sense of sanity in education, media, literature, art, music, government and society.
That process leads us to the present day. You will find lots of people offering you the pair of easy answer and blame, but all of these are lies. What went wrong was that we gave in to our inner evil and the Simian self-important beast that lurks beneath the surface in each of us. We dressed it up, in the way only clever white people can do, as enlightenment and empathy, but really, it was venality and license bubbling to the surface.
The situation has not changed. One in a hundred is capable of making these choices, but we have all one hundred choose, drowning out the leadership capable. We either put these natural leaders back on top and have them suppress the rest of the population, or we will be oppressed by the rest as they continue to choose sociopathic and simplistic illusion over reality.
Editor’s Note
The reason to republish this article is that it is closely related to the RW outrage in India. The JNU saga has hardly ended and we already have two new events catching the limelight — false history books in schools and the Durga-Mahishashur debate. The leftists have stolen a march over the RW all over the world while all that RW can do is engage in outrage, including their established parties. Does BJP in India closely resemble the GOP in the US? That would make a good topic for debate.
Editorial illustration for “Reservations: The Brahamastra for Ghar Wapsi”.
The Upper Caste rants against reservations just hit the crescendo with the recent Jat riots in Haryana, which caused massive destruction of public property. These rants are well justified and grounded in the libertarian thoughts which many of the Right Wingers have directly copied from the west. Sadly like all other borrowed ideology, the imitation is perfect and the libertarian cheerleaders have forgotten to tweak and adapt them according to local conditions. There is a huge momentum built around reservations based on economic inequality and doing away with caste-based reservations. Given how it is adopted blindly by many of the right wing Hindu intellectuals, it is utmost important to describe the one constitutional provision which has helped in consolidating Hindus more than anything else. While most constitutional provisions like temple control, RTE etc. are stacked against Hindus, only reservations is one tool which is favourable against the onslaught of Abrahamic religions. By the end of this article, we should be able to convince you why all Hindus should bury the hatchet against caste-based reservations for the next few decades and use it as an active policy tool to counter missionary activity through Ghar Wapsi.
Let’s go back to February 2015 to understand the importance of caste-based reservations, which Hindu organizations have ignored till now. The bench of Justices Dipak Misra and V. Gopala Gowda held that a person shall not be deprived of reservation benefits if he decides to “reconvert” to Hinduism and adopts the caste of his forefathers. The case was brought to court by an individual whose grandparents had converted to Christianity while he reconverted back to Hinduism and availed reservation benefits. This is what the Supreme Court had to say:
If a person born to Christian parents, who had converted to Christianity from the Scheduled Caste Hindu, can avail the benefits of the caste certificate after embracing Hinduism, there cannot be any soundness of logic that he cannot avail similar benefits because his grandparents were converted and he was born to parents who were Christians.
This decision has now removed the inter-generational gap between conversion and reconversion within the fold of Hinduism to avail reservation benefits, thus opening the way for Hindus to win the demographic battle stacked against them. With this single decision, the Supreme Court has given the Brahmastra to fight both the menace of aggressive Evangelization efforts in India as well as high Muslim fertility. Extending the right of reservation to those who converted generations ago will give the massive carrot which can be dangled in front of Muslims as well as Christians to get them back into the Hindu fold.
As expected, this decision caused massive heartburn among the sickulars of the country. Sad thing is most of the people on the Hindu Right have overlooked the benefits of this one policy in countering the Abrahamic religions. The cry for substituting the current reservation policy from caste to economic status is getting louder each day. Also, there has been an active policy push by Christian organizations to extend quota benefits to Dalit Christians and Muslims. While Hindus have more or less ignored this issue, this constitutional disparity has been an important topic for atrocity literature published in the west:
The loss of constitutional privileges upon conversion, however, serves as a serious impediment to their freedom to choose their religion. Additionally, most Dalits are ultimately unable to escape their treatment as “untouchables” regardless of the religion they profess. The introduction of anti-conversion legislation in several states has further made religious conversion extremely difficult if not impossible. Finally, Dalits may become targets of forced “reconversions” to Hinduism by sangh parivar groups.
Since the Church feeds on poverty and deprivation, the reservation policy has been one policy tool which has blunted their advances in many parts of the country. Just to connect the dots, one can look at the history of activism by Arvind Kejriwal, who started his career by protesting against reservations under the banner of Youth for Equality. The massive funding he gets from foreign organizations is enough to explain the reasons behind his earlier stand and whether he was executing the agenda on behalf of foreign masters.
While people protesting against reservations cannot be faulted completely, they are actually helping the agenda of the missionaries. The recent Jat and Patel agitations had the undercurrent of either extending reservations to their communities or completely removing them. Seen under the light of missionary propaganda, it is not a mystery why these protests are mainstreaming the idea of removal of caste-based reservation.
What is the way forward?
For the benefit of India and to maintain Hindu demographic superiority, it is essential that Hindus do not fall for the current attempts to remove the caste-based reservations in favour of reservations based on income. Keeping the Hindu dominance under reservation is only possible under caste-based reservation as changing it to income will completely change the rules of the game.
No matter how much the Muslims or Christians cry over discrimination, they cannot avail caste-based reservations on a massive scale due to theological equality provided under Islam and Christianity. Since the Constitution already acknowledges it, it has made the task simple for Hindus.
Hindu organizations should use it as an active policy tool to get jobs for reconverted Hindus and blunt the monetary advantage of Abrahamics.
The quota level can be increased from the current ad-hoc 50% level set by the SC to higher levels so that there is healthy competition within the quota and an increased pool of better candidates. What most people forget is that increasing the quota is also another way to dilute quota benefits. Tamil Nadu model can be extended to the rest of India to actively squeeze the benefits available to people from other religions, while improving the quality of quota-based candidates.
This policy should be maintained till India achieves middle-income country status, when it would completely blunt the conversion business of evangelists. No surprise, the Church has made so many attempts to keep Indians poor and marginalised. If used well for the next 2–3 decades, this single policy can completely recover the losses made by Dharmic religions in India.
Rather than asking for implementing no-conversion as a state policy, Hindus need to actively use reservations as the carrot to dangle in front of Muslims or Christians and increase their numbers before it is too late. No-conversion will effectively block any reconversion back to Hinduism. Given the massive state benefit through reservations for reconversion, Hindus should not advocate for a no-conversion policy.
Contextual editorial illustration for the restored article.
Covering up scandals is the most important job of the Church, right behind the job of spreading the message of Christ. Given the lack of spiritual training and forced celibacy practised by the Church, it is no surprise that a lot of pastors turn to abusing kids and women. The sad thing is the media usually works alongside the Church and usually buries these stories deep down.
The recent cover-up is in the case of pastor Joseph Palanivel Jeyapaul from the Catholic Church of South India. According to a report by The News Minute:
After serving a shorter prison term, Jeyapaul returned to India a few months ago. And in a move that has shocked child rights activists in the state, the Roman Catholic Church of Southern India has now lifted the suspension against him. He was sentenced to a shorter term in jail based on a plea bargain, with the condition that he does not get back to ministerial duties or get in contact with children.
There is no media outrage in India nor any reports on how the South Indian Church decided to reinstate a convicted paedophile as a bishop. This will only put the life of Indian children at risk as well as their dignity. This incident just showcases the power that the Church wields in India as no one else would have gotten away with the act of reinstating a paedophile. This only shows how big the rot is and the influence of these missionaries in India. Hindus need to be wary of such subversive ideologies.
Originally published February 25, 2016 on Yuga Parivartan.
Contextual editorial illustration for the restored article.
PM Modi should be lauded for the efforts that he is putting in to make India an industrial hub and generate jobs for the rising young population. But the efforts beg a question — whether Make in India will work as a policy and achieve its desired objectives i.e. increase the share of manufacturing and generate jobs. Given the current regulatory environment, the answer seems no. Let’s explore why.
Before understanding whether Make in India will work, look at the historical composition of the Indian economy:
[Chart: Structural change in Indian economy — shares of manufacturing, agriculture and services over time] Source: Rubina Verma, Journal of Development Economics, 2012 — restored contextual visual.
India is an outlier when it comes to structural change of the economy. At India’s level of per capita GDP, most countries would have a higher share of manufacturing rather than services. India is different because it directly jumped from a high share of agriculture to the services sector, bypassing the growth in manufacturing that is seen as an intermediate step in most developing economies. Thus India missed on pulling out its masses from the agricultural sector. Although services contribute more than 50% to Indian GDP, the sector employs a much smaller proportion of the population. On the other hand, manufacturing share has remained almost constant in terms of GDP.
Make in India should be seen in this context — to correct the historical bias in India’s growth story and revive manufacturing to generate jobs on a mass scale as happened in China. Indian regulations have been blamed for this lopsided non-growth in manufacturing. To understand whether Make in India can give a boost, we need to look at the three basic factor market inputs for any sector: capital, land and labour.
1) Capital
Capital markets have been relatively free and open in India — there is a well-developed stock market as well as banking services to infuse capital into new firms. But the banking sector which forms the core of this factor market has been brought to its knees due to unscrupulous lending to crony capitalists. The public sector banks are in dire need of massive capital infusion without which they cannot kick-start the lending cycle. Bad plus restructured loans form 17% of total assets of public sector banks. One can forget about firms investing in new projects given that banks are not in a position to take risk and lend money. Modi’s initiative to court foreign investors can ameliorate this problem to some extent but FDI and FII are not going to reignite investment in the whole economy.
Summary: Capital market is unhealthy.
2) Land
Land is another crucial factor, but unlike capital it is highly regulated in India. Given problems in land acquisition, serious businessmen who do not have deep pockets to bribe the establishment cannot set up any industry. The Land Acquisition Bill passed by the last UPA government delivered the final nail in the coffin — making acquiring land a gargantuan task, almost impossible for any small investor. Since the Modi government could not pass modifications to the current land bill, the land market is completely strangulated at the current moment.
Summary: Land market is as unfriendly as under UPA.
3) Labour
Labour is the third main factor market and is again highly regulated. A massive number of regulations kick in once a firm crosses employment thresholds. This along with firing costs makes it almost impossible for any firm to shut down loss-making operations, thus putting a brake on the process of creative destruction.
[Chart: Discontinuous decrease in number of enterprises at 10 employees threshold] Source: Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, 2014 — restored contextual visual.
Since many labour regulations kick in at 10 employees, the sharp decrease in the number of enterprises at that threshold is not a surprise. Another important drawback of these labour regulations is that they have forced the manufacturing sector to automate, making this sector highly capital intensive — which again means there would not be enough employment generation even if firms figure out how to invest and acquire land.
[Chart: Ratio of value added by labour-intensive vs non-labour-intensive sectors in India] Source: Kochhar et al, 2006 — restored contextual visual.
What clearly stands out is that at India’s level of per capita GDP, the share of labour-intensive sectors is too low. China at four times India’s per capita income uses the same labour mix as India. Sadly, beyond the slogans the Modi government has not passed any game-changing laws for labour deregulation either. Unless trade unions and other vested interests are taken head-on, it is highly unlikely that India can generate enough jobs for its youth.
Summary: Labour market is strangulated.
Given these deep problems with factor markets, it will only be a miracle if Modi can deliver ten million new jobs every year through his Make in India initiative. The fundamentals are wrong and it will be plain stupidity to expect otherwise. While big conferences are a good PR exercise, they cannot replace serious policy changes. Hopefully the Modi government will learn the art of the possible before it is too late.
References:
Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, Indian Labor Regulations and the Cost of Corruption: Evidence from the Firm Size Distribution, 2014
Rubina Verma, Can Total Factor Productivity Explain Value Added Growth in Services? — Journal of Development Economics, 2012
Kochhar et al, India’s Patterns of Development: What Happened, What Follows, IMF, 2006
Originally published February 21, 2016 on Yuga Parivartan.
Contextual editorial illustration for the restored article.
PM Modi should be lauded for the efforts that he is putting in to make India an industrial hub and generate jobs for the rising young population. But the efforts beg a question — will Make in India work as a policy and achieve its desired objectives i.e. increase the share of manufacturing and generate jobs? Given the current regulatory environment, the answer seems no. Let’s explore why.
Before understanding whether Make in India will work, look at the historical composition of the Indian economy:
[Chart: Structural change in Indian economy — shares of manufacturing, agriculture and services over time] Source: Rubina Verma, Journal of Development Economics, 2012 — restored contextual visual.
India is an outlier when it comes to structural change of the economy. At India’s level of per capita GDP, most countries would have a higher share of manufacturing rather than services. India is different because it directly jumped from a high share of agriculture to the services sector, bypassing the growth in manufacturing that is seen as an intermediate step in most developing economies. Thus India missed out on pulling its masses from the agricultural sector. Although services contribute more than 50% to Indian GDP, the sector employs a much smaller proportion of the population. On the other hand, the manufacturing share has remained almost constant in terms of GDP, with only a slightly higher share in employment.
The Make in India initiative should be seen in this context — to correct the historical bias in India’s growth story and revive the manufacturing sector to generate jobs on a mass scale as happened in China. Indian regulations have been blamed for this lopsided non-growth in manufacturing. So, can Make in India style initiatives give a boost to Indian manufacturing? To understand this we need to look at the basics without getting carried away by Modi’s hard work and intent.
Although structural change can be caused by preference or income changes in the population, at India’s level of per capita GDP we can rule them out. So we have to look at the supply side and understand why manufacturing did not pick up in India and whether the current government has changed anything on the ground. For any sector to flourish, one needs to look at the input requirements. The inputs are basically three — capital, land and labour — which are often called factor markets.
1) Capital
Capital is needed for setting up any industry. Capital markets have been relatively free and open in India — there is a well-developed stock market as well as banking services to infuse capital into new firms. But what is the current situation on the ground? The banking sector which forms the core of this factor market has been brought to its knees due to unscrupulous lending to crony capitalists. The public sector banks are in dire need of massive capital infusion without which they cannot kick-start the lending cycle. The bad plus restructured loans form 17% of total assets of public sector banks.
This means that an otherwise healthy sector is not working well in the country. One can forget about firms investing in new projects given that banks are not in a position to take risk and lend money. Modi’s initiative to court foreign investors with deep pockets can ameliorate this problem to some extent but FDI and FII are not going to reignite investment in the whole economy.
Summary: Capital market is unhealthy.
2) Land
Land is another crucial factor, but unlike capital it is highly regulated in India. Given problems in land acquisition, serious businessmen who do not have deep pockets to bribe the establishment cannot set up any industry. This factor market impeded the growth of the manufacturing sector because it needs to acquire massive tracts of land unlike the services sector. The Land Acquisition Bill passed by the last UPA government delivered the final nail in the coffin — making acquiring land a gargantuan task, an almost impossible feat for any small investor.
Since the Modi government could not pass modifications to the current land bill in the last few Parliament sessions, the land market is completely strangulated at the current moment. Given policy uncertainty and huge costs involved in acquiring land, no serious player would put his money in manufacturing. Unlike with capital markets where Modi is courting foreign investors, the government does not seem to be doing enough to improve the land market. Probably the land acquisition model of Naidu in Andhra Pradesh can provide some hints to the Modi government on how to bypass this deadlock — but they are all quick fixes rather than long-term solutions.
Summary: Land market is as unfriendly as under UPA.
3) Labour
Labour is the third main factor market and is again highly regulated. A massive number of regulations kick in once a firm crosses employment thresholds. This along with firing costs makes it almost impossible for any firm to shut down loss-making operations, thus putting a brake on the process of creative destruction — an important ingredient of a market economy.
[Chart: Discontinuous decrease in number of enterprises at 10 employees threshold] Source: Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, 2014 — restored contextual visual.
Since many labour regulations kick in at 10 employees, the sharp decrease in the number of enterprises at that threshold is not a surprise. Another important drawback of these labour regulations is that they have forced the manufacturing sector to automate — making it highly capital intensive, which again means there will not be enough employment generation even if firms figure out how to invest and acquire land.
[Chart: Ratio of value added by labour-intensive vs non-labour-intensive sectors in India] Source: Kochhar et al, 2006 — restored contextual visual.
What clearly stands out is that at India’s level of per capita GDP, the share of labour-intensive sectors is too low — firms use more capital instead of labour. China at four times India’s per capita income uses the same labour mix as India. Given labour regulations in India, not only do firms invest in capital-intensive sectors, but they also try to replace labour with capital whenever possible.
Sadly, beyond the slogans, the Modi government has not passed any game-changing laws for labour deregulation either. Even if the Make in India initiative picks up, it is highly unlikely that new firms will invest in labour-intensive sectors — with the end result that there won’t be enough employment generation. Rajasthan under Vasundhara has shown some interest in changing these regulations, but the central government has shied away from pursuing these issues. Unless trade unions and other vested interests are taken head-on to bring these changes, it is highly unlikely that India can generate enough jobs for its youth.
Summary: Labour market is strangulated.
Given these deep problems with factor markets, it will only be a miracle if Modi can deliver ten million new jobs every year through his Make in India initiative. The fundamentals are wrong and it will be plain stupidity to expect otherwise. While big conferences are a good PR exercise, they cannot replace serious policy changes. Everyone knows that BJP does not have a majority in Rajya Sabha, but “Reforms are the art of the possible” as stated by Arun Jaitley on multiple occasions. Hopefully, the Modi government will learn this art before it is too late.
References:
Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, Indian Labor Regulations and the Cost of Corruption: Evidence from the Firm Size Distribution, 2014
Rubina Verma, Can Total Factor Productivity Explain Value Added Growth in Services? — Journal of Development Economics, 2012
Kochhar et al, India’s Patterns of Development: What Happened, What Follows, IMF, 2006
Originally published February 21, 2016 on Yuga Parivartan.
Editorial illustration for “The RW reaction to JNU”.
For the first time since 2014, the Modi government seems to be on an offensive against the anti-national elements. Although some vigour was shown to cut down international NGO funding, that happened behind closed doors and the message did not travel fast and wide — with the result that the anti-nationals got some time to put their act together and mount one attack after the other, with the intolerance debate and award wapsi being prime examples. Modi government seems to have now finally woken up from its deep slumber and did not avoid acting on anti-national activities in its backyard. The complete silence on Malda had otherwise put even its best supporters on the backfoot.
There are two arguments doing the rounds on social media lately and need instant attention. Both of them are the result of a lack of understanding on these issues by the RW. The slapping of anti-sedition laws on some JNU students has caused a furore among their benefactors, which was more or less expected — but a lot of self-proclaimed RW persons also seem confused in their response. There are many intertwined issues here, but let’s look at the confusion of the RW.
The first point being raised in defence of anti-nationals is that these students raising the slogans in JNU form a fringe minority on the campus. The left will obviously raise this point but some on the right have also bought it without any background check. JNU has been a hotbed of anti-national activities since the time of the Naxalbari movement and this was not a stray incident. Look at the poster above, which forms the normal discourse inside the JNU campus. Can anyone in his sane mind claim that this agenda is driven by fringe elements? The arrest of the president of JNU’s student union, Kanhaiya Kumar, should clear anyone’s doubt on the acceptance of this anti-national behaviour on the campus. Had it been otherwise, the president of the student wing would have been much more careful before lending his support to such secessionist sloganeering inside the campus. The support these students got from their faculty members should clear any other remaining doubts about the support for such activities in JNU. The fact of the matter is that it is the first time that media has decided to raise this issue — otherwise support for such anti-India views has been mainstream in JNU campus under SFI and AISA, the left wing organizations which have controlled the student union for most of JNU’s history. So it would be completely wrong to push this issue under the carpet by claiming that these are fringe elements on the JNU campus.
The second issue which has found more resonance among the RW is that the sedition laws are illiberal and have colonial legacy.
If there are non-violent, non-terrorist activists, liberal society should tolerate them. Unwise use of sedition law.
— Rupa Subramanya (@rupasubramanya), February 12, 2016
Did you hear even a single voice from the left give a similar analogy in favour of Kamlesh Tiwari’s freedom of speech when he was hounded by using another British-era law? The hate-speech laws are even more abominable and much more difficult to prove in court than sedition laws. Also, both of them are British-era laws — but hate-speech is misused rather frequently to support Islamists and the leftist agenda, while the sedition law is hardly ever invoked. Does this mean that the RW should take a moral high ground and become the sole guardian of liberal ideas in this country and give a free pass to leftists to carry out their agenda? Probably they need to learn the rule of golden silence from their leftist compatriots.
There is no reason for the RW to be apologetic about this issue and it should embrace sedition laws, especially in cases where the left wants to compromise the territorial integrity of India. No country can allow free speech on a secessionist agenda, especially when such elements wilfully play as useful pawns in the hands of foreign enemies. If anything, the RW should use this issue to highlight the hate-speech laws and brow-beat the left on their duplicity. It is high time that the RW learns some realpolitik from the left and stops taking moral high ground on each and every issue. The public mood has backed the action of slapping sedition laws against these parasitic students and the Modi government should use this opportunity to further increase pressure on leftist groups and build on its offensive posture. The intolerance debate has been in the limelight for too long — so it is high time to show some real intolerance.
But whether slapping charges on students, who are mere pawns in this game, serves the RW purpose is a valid question that one should ask. The real masters behind the “Idea of India” brigade are not really affected by the arrest of some youth who were in any case disposable assets. But this action at least sends the signal that the RW is on offence now and would not mind some collateral damage. If Modi thinks he can win the next elections by playing Goody Two Shoes, then he is under grand delusion.
Editorial illustration for “Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: The Case of Japan (Richard L. Rubenstein)”.
By Richard L. Rubenstein. Originally published at Amerika.org and republished here with permission.
Few, if any, developments in the postwar era possess as great a significance as the rise of Japan. Normally, Japan’s rise is discussed in economic or political terms. Its religious significance, especially for a nation such as the United States whose cultural inheritance is so deeply rooted in biblical religion, is seldom discussed, much less understood. Japan is the world’s most successful nation with non-Christian roots. Even the Soviet Union has Christian roots. Marxist atheism is grounded in the very biblical tradition that Marxism negates. Moreover, the apparent conflict between the Western proponents of a biblically grounded attitude and a secular ethic takes on the appearance of a family quarrel when seen against the horizon of Japanese religion and culture. Far from being the antithesis of biblical religion, the secular spirit that pervades so much of Western life is its unintended consequence. Wherever the biblical faith in a unique, exclusive, extramundane God penetrated, it was utterly destructive of indigenous gods and traditions. Sooner or later this polemical, desacralizing faith was bound to give birth to a consciousness that would not rest until all the gods without exception were dethroned. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that a civilization as determined to preserve its own integrity as Japan should marshal all its forces to resist both the believing and the secular manifestations of biblical religion.
The Japanese have created a thoroughly modern, highly technological, capitalist civilization whose religious foundations rest upon animistic and polytheistic traditions that adherents of the biblical religions normally assume to be discredited, primitive, and idolatrous — a remnant of a far earlier stage of religious “evolution.” From the Japanese perspective, such views are, of course, utterly without substance.
We can perhaps best understand the long-range significance of the religious aspects of the challenge of Japanese capitalism if we consider the role of religion in fostering the rise of capitalism in both Japan and the nations of the West. In the case of the West, no one attempting to understand the role of religion in the development of capitalism can ignore the work of the German sociologist Max Weber. As is well known, Weber set forth the thesis that the modern Western bourgeois-capitalist world is an unintended consequence of the rise of ascetic Protestantism in the aftermath of the Reformation.
Weber did not hold that religion by itself was the cause of modern capitalism. He regarded religion as a necessary but not sufficient factor in the origin of modern economic rationalism. Weber stressed that material conditions alone could not have produced the peculiar form of economic rationalism in which the impulse to accumulate was combined with disciplined restraints upon consumption. Nor could capitalism by itself have produced the kind of economic ethic needed for its development. Weber held that the economic ethic which fostered the development of capitalism was an unintended consequence of the work of the great reformers, especially John Calvin, and their followers.
Predestination and Power
According to Weber, Calvin’s doctrine of double predestination was of crucial importance for the development of modern capitalism. By insisting that the issue of personal salvation had been settled at the very first moment of creation, Calvinism had the effect of radically devaluing the religious significance of all earthly institutions, including the Church. The believer was thrust back upon himself with no assurance of where he stood before an awesome, inscrutable, and utterly sovereign God. The believer’s situation was further aggravated by the fact that there was no longer any credible mediating agency authorized to prescribe the conditions under which an individual, aided by God’s grace, might merit salvation. Concerning the impact of predestination, Weber observes that the doctrine produced “a feeling of unprecedented inner loneliness of the single individual.”
Under the circumstances, it was inevitable that the believer seek for some hint of where he or she stood in the divine order. According to Weber, at this point economic activity took on a new meaning for the believing Protestant. Service in one’s worldly calling, even if it involved deriving profit from money itself, soon came to be regarded as offering the believer a sign of where he or she stood before the Creator. A believer who had prospered in his calling could reasonably assume that the God who had predestined all things from the beginning had been the ultimate cause of his or her well-being. The sober, methodical accumulation of wealth took on a religious meaning it had never before possessed. Thus, methodical work within the profane world became the path to overcoming anxiety concerning one’s ultimate destiny that prayer, ritual, and mystical contemplation had been in other traditions.
The radical devaluation of the normal religious media of redemption by ascetic Protestantism was part of a process identified by Weber as the “disenchantment of the world.” According to Weber, the roots of this disenchantment — which was indispensable to the development of the distinctive rationalism of the modern world — were to be found in the monotheistic exclusivism of biblical Judaism. By affirming a unique, supramundane, creator God, biblical Judaism denied any inherent sacrality to the natural world or to the political order. Of particular interest with regard to Japan is the fact that biblical religion was especially vehement in its rejection of the institution of divine kingship. The Bible’s radical desacralization of both the natural and the political order was an enormously significant step toward the rational mastery of the world.
Nevertheless, before the rationalizing activities of the modern era — the creation of an impersonal market economy, scientific investigation, and bureaucratic organization — could become culturally predominant, these activities had to be given a religiously legitimated, positive valence. Weber argued that this only became possible after ascetic Protestantism had redefined worldly activity, including the taking of interest, as a way of serving God. Only the combination of rationalization and Protestantism’s interpretation of worldly activity as a sacred calling could have provided the “take-off” energies that made capitalism possible in the West.
The development toward a purely secular, rationalized society can thus be seen as an unintended sociological consequence of biblical Judaism’s “disenchantment of the world.” The full force of biblical “disenchantment” was felt only after Protestantism elevated the authority of the Bible over that of the Church.
Divine Authority and Filial Piety
From a social-psychological perspective, Protestantism’s rejection of the authority of the church can be seen as a revolt of the sons against the fathers. A similar revolt was indispensable for the successful displacement of traditional society by modern civilization. According to sociologist Robert Bellah, biblical religion provided the legitimation that made these revolts ethically and psychologically acceptable.
Bellah’s argument takes as its starting point a comparison of the father-son symbolism in Christianity and Confucianism. Although the father-son symbolism plays a decisive role in Christianity, the natural family has little or no religious significance in biblical religion. By contrast, the father-son symbolism is inapplicable to the Ultimate in Confucianism, whereas the natural family has overwhelming religious significance.
Contrary to both popular and Freudian belief, the biblical God was not originally a father-god but the ultimate Suzerain of a political association. The Bible depicts God’s relationship with Israel not as a natural family but as a political treaty — a covenant. In such a pact, the superior party stipulates the conditions under which he will protect the inferior party as well as the penalties incurred for lack of fidelity to the terms of the treaty.
Isaiah ben-Dasan, a perceptive Japanese writer who took an Israeli pseudonym, has also argued that the divine-human relation in biblical religion could not be understood through the analogy of the relation between a natural parent and child. He argued that the relation was that “between adopted child and adoptive parent.” By thus depicting the divine-human relationship, biblical religion introduced an element of insecurity and anxiety into Western religious life. Unlike the unconditional relationship between a natural parent and child, that between an adoptive parent and child is likely to be conditional upon the fulfillment of contractual obligations.
As ben-Dasan reminds us, adoption is a parent-child relationship established by contract. This is in fact how the Bible depicts God’s relationship with Israel. The conditional character of the relationship is repeatedly stated. By contrast, ben-Dasan points out that the Japanese find the biblical idea of God as an adoptive parent distasteful. They regard their relationship with their deities as one of blood, like that of mother and child, as in the tradition of the descent of the emperor from the sun goddess, Amaterasu-omikami.
In biblical traditions, religion and the family are represented by a common set of symbols, yet they are institutionally differentiated. While filial piety is a supreme virtue in Confucianism, both Christianity and Judaism tend to devalue filial piety when it conflicts with the imperatives of religion. Before the Reformation, only the celibate clergy and monastic orders were in theory expected to hearken to this injunction in its full severity. The Reformation radicalized and universalized the injunction by its doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Without realizing it, the Reformers had unleashed the full revolutionary force of biblical religion’s subordination of the natural sphere — the nuclear family and the extended family we know as the nation — to a supramundane principal.
In general, traditional societies can be understood as more or less autonomous, religiously legitimated, extended kinship groups in which far greater emphasis is accorded to collective than to individual interests. As we shall see, in spite of its modernization, Japan remains such a society. An enormous psychic effort is required to reject traditional society for the individualistic, depersonalized professionalism of the modern capitalist West. Weber believed that only a religiously legitimated redefinition of the sacred could have fostered the transformation. The Reformation’s assertion that all things human are to be subordinated to the sovereign Creator God gave Protestants the moral and emotional leverage to turn away from old ways and begin anew — not once but continually.
By contrast, filial piety is at the heart of the Confucian ethic. Unlike biblical religion, the Confucian system has no point of leverage by means of which disobedience to parents could be justified. Without willingness to breach the ethic of filial piety, as was done in Western religion, there does not seem to have been any way in which the revolutionary new beginnings necessary for modernization could have been initiated within a Confucian civilization.
Nevertheless, not only has East Asia modernized and adopted capitalism, but it has done so with far greater success than Africa, the Middle East, or Latin America. Hence, the question arises whether Weber’s Protestant-ethic hypothesis has been disproven. In reality, Weber did not hold that the non-Western nations were incapable of modernization or capitalist development. He did, however, believe that the process could only have been initiated in the Protestant West.
A Tradition is Challenged
Perhaps the most fundamental insight offered by Weber is that, in addition to appropriate material conditions, traditional societies can only be transformed into modern societies by a radical redefinition of the sacred. The case of Japan would appear to confirm this insight. Even before the appearance of Commodore Matthew Perry and his “Black Ships” in 1853, word of China’s humiliation in 1842 at the hands of Great Britain had reached Japan. Shortly after China’s defeat, a questionnaire was addressed by an official of the shogunate to one of the Hollanders living in Nagasaki. The European was asked why the Tartars had lost. The Hollander replied: “Bravery alone is not sufficient, the art of war demands something more. No outlandish power can compete with a European one, as can be seen by the great realm of China which has been conquered by only four thousand men.”
When China’s humiliation was followed by the forcible opening of Japan by Commodore Perry in 1853 and the unequal commercial treaties forced upon Japan between 1858 and 1866, Japan had the choice of either radically restructuring her society or suffering defeat and humiliation by the predatory Western powers. Japan was threatened economically as well as militarily. With tariffs on goods imported to Japan set by foreigners and with Japan’s handicraft industries incapable of competing with Western factories, Japan soon found herself flooded with manufactured foreign goods that ruined much of her domestic handicraft industry at a time when her currency was rapidly depreciating and high inflation was dangerously distorting her domestic economy.
As we know, the foreign threat was met speedily and successfully by perhaps the most radical restructuring of any society the world has ever known. One of the most remarkable aspects of Japan’s modernization is that it was carried out with relatively little bloodshed. The samurai elite responsible for the Meiji Restoration of 1868 were genuine revolutionaries who had largely emerged from a group of dissidents from the lower strata of their class. Crucial to the success of their revolution was the transformation wrought in the imperial office, whose sacred charismatic character is deeply rooted in Japan’s earliest history. Just as religion had played a crucial role in the modernization of the West, so too a very different kind of religion — one that rested upon the archaic institution of divine kingship — played an equally important role in Japan’s modernization.
Reestablishment of the Emperor’s Authority
The final step in bringing the shogunate to an end was taken with the Meiji Restoration and the proclamation of the sacred character of the imperial office. The first article of the constitution of 1889 reads: “The Empire of Japan shall be reigned over and governed by a line of Emperors unbroken for ages eternal.” The third article reads: “The Emperor is sacred and inviolable.”
Perhaps the most important interpreter of the Meiji era was Prince Ito, who was largely responsible for drafting the written constitution. His Commentaries on the Constitution appeared in 1889. In the Meiji period the emperor lost the ability to speak independently of his counselors — he spoke, if at all, through the oligarchs who governed in his name. No longer could dissidents claim to speak on his behalf in opposing the policies of government. Power was exercised in his name while the ceremonial aspects of the imperial institution were exalted.
In spite of the loss of an active political role, the imperial institution gained overwhelming new importance. As a direct descendant of the sun goddess Amaterasu-omi-kami, the emperor symbolized national continuity, identity, and sovereignty at a time when foreigners threatened these values more profoundly than at any other time in Japan’s history. The Meiji oligarchs were thus able to utilize the imperial institution to “give unprecedented policies the color of great antiquity” and “to make it appear that what was in fact an administration by relatively lowly placed new men proceeded instead from the most highly pedigreed and unquestionably legitimate of all possible sources.”
When we compare the extreme social and political disorders that accompanied the transformation of traditional into modern capitalist societies in the Christian West with the relatively bloodless transformation that took place in non-Christian Japan, the Japanese achievement appears truly impressive. Unlike their modernizing counterparts in the English Revolution of the seventeenth century and the French Revolution of the late eighteenth century — who purchased the transformation of their respective societies with regicide and civil war — the modernizing elite of Japan succeeded in rationalizing the economy and society of their nation with a minimum of domestic violence or alienation of elite classes and institutions.
By utilizing a seemingly conservative doctrine — that of the emperor’s divinity — to legitimate a radical social and political revolution, the elite was able to create a strong central government, abolish all estate distinctions, eliminate warrior privileges, open military service to commoners, establish a system of universal public education, and facilitate the entry of members of the samurai class into the world of business and commerce. All this was done without the transformation of traditional elites and institutions into embittered enemies of the new social order as was so often the case in Europe.
Modernization and Tradition
That thoughtful Japanese leaders of the Meiji era were concerned lest too great a reliance on Western ways lead to the destruction of the value of filial piety is evident in the “Imperial Rescript: the Great Principles of Education, 1879,” written by Motoda Eifu, the Confucian lecturer to the emperor. The rescript states that the push toward Western ways had “a serious defect: it reduced benevolence, justice, loyalty, and filial piety to a secondary position.”
The Imperial Rescript on Education of 1890 gives expression to the determination of Japan’s leaders to preserve the historic continuity of Japanese civilization and its values at a time of the most revolutionary socioeconomic transformations in all of Japanese history. Whereas the West initiated modernization with a rejection of the highest religious and political authorities — not excluding regicide — and tended to equate modernization with secularization, Japan undertook modernization under the authority of its supreme religio-political authority and in defense of the values of its traditional civilization.
The religious traditions fostering modernization in Japan and the West can thus be seen as polar opposites. Where one is Jewish, Christian, or Muslim, it is impossible to worship the God of Abraham without rejecting the gods of one’s earliest ancestors. In order to worship the God of the Bible, somewhere in history a drastic uprooting process had to have taken place. The old pagan gods had to be forsworn and the ways of one’s oldest ancestors abandoned.
The contrast with earthbound, non-nomadic Japan — a nation that has never forsworn her most ancient gods nor thought of these spirits as separate from nature — could not be greater. Japan’s modernization was predicated upon unconditional reaffirmation of the sacred connection between the modern state and its most archaic roots. Unlike every nation of Judaeo-Christian inheritance, the Japanese alone remain in contact with their oldest sources of religious and cultural values.
Two Paths to Modernization
When in 1945 the victorious Americans used their political leverage to secure the emperor’s denial of his divinity, they were responding to the institution of divine kingship in a way that accorded with their age-old biblical tradition. MacArthur favored the return of Christian missionaries in large numbers to Japan and saw the occupation as an unparalleled opportunity for the conversion of the Japanese to Christianity. In spite of apparently favorable circumstances, the postwar missionaries who came to Japan quickly discovered that few, if any, free countries offer less promise to Christian missions than Japan. After more than a century of strenuous efforts, with one of the world’s largest concentrations of foreign missionaries — almost 5,200 in number — Japan remains more resistant to Christianity than any other developed country. Less than 1 percent of the population is Christian and the numbers are declining.
Apart from the fact that Christianity is rejected as “un-Japanese” by a population with a very strong sense of group identity and a strong distrust of anything foreign that cannot be readily assimilated, the Japanese find the biblical conceptions of an omnipotent, extramundane Creator who establishes a covenant with a non-Japanese group utterly lacking in credibility.
It is precisely that which a “disenchanting” religion rejects — namely, animism and polytheism — that Shinto affirms. Moreover, it should be noted that, in spite of its animism and polytheism, Shinto plays a significant role in contemporary Japanese business, science, and technology. Among the leading corporations that have Shinto shrines at their headquarters are the Sanwa Group, Toyota, the Mitsubishi group, Hitachi, Toshiba, and Matsushita. Groundbreaking ceremonies for new factories usually involve a Shinto ritual, as was the case at the groundbreaking ceremonies for Mazda’s new automobile factory in Michigan and the jointly owned Chrysler-Mitsubishi American factory.
Biblical religion and indigenous Japanese religious tradition have thus provided alternative paths to the modern capitalist world. Biblical religion alone, with its denigration of filial piety and its tradition of relativizing human institutions in the light of the ideal of service to a sovereign Creator God, possessed the psychic mechanism to begin the monumental breach with the past implied in modernization. One can say without exaggeration that the modern Western world is largely an unintended consequence of the cultural triumph of a biblical understanding of the nature of things.
Nevertheless, if Japan did not have a value system capable of initiating a fundamental breach with the past, it did have the religious and cultural resources necessary to defend its civilization against the West — and it has done that with astonishing success. Japanese modernization was essentially a defensive strategy: first, to secure Japan against Western military aggression; second, to defend Japan against Western economic aggression; and ultimately, to defend Japanese civilization against the destruction of its historic values that would most assuredly have ensued if Japan as a nation had been converted to any form of biblical religion.
The majority of Japanese have interpreted their postwar economic and technological achievements as confirming the superiority of their civilization over that of their trading partners and competitors. If ever the Japanese were amenable to conversion to a biblical religion, that time has passed. In a dialogue between Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone and Professor Takeshi Umehara, the prime minister offered the following comment on Japanese religion:
The Japanese tend toward polytheism rather than monotheism. We believe in many gods and consider ourselves part of nature’s unending cycle. There is broad and general acceptance of the idea that a man’s fate is inseparable from that of every animal, tree, and blade of grass. Japan’s ancestor worship is thus quite different from Christianity’s contract between man and his monotheistic god. In the process of honoring our forefathers, we create the harmony which is such an integral part of our life-style.
Unlike most allegedly primitive indigenous religions, Japanese religion has demonstrated its power to inspire a capitalist civilization capable of competing successfully with the West in almost every significant sphere of human activity. Seldom, if ever, has the monotheistic exclusivism of biblical religion been challenged as successfully as it has by modern Japan.
It should be obvious that this writer has a very profound respect for the achievements of Japanese civilization, especially in the Meiji and post-World War II periods. Nevertheless, he feels constrained to conclude by raising an issue that may prove to be of considerable importance in the years ahead. Those who fault biblical religion for its exclusivism tend to overlook one of its principal strengths, namely, its ability to unite men and women hitherto strangers to each other in a new community of worship and moral obligation. By contrast, while Japan has been most successful in defending the integrity, continuity, and organic character of its civilization, its indigenous traditions offer little basis for a wider base of community than that which rests on kinship and common descent.
In view of the overwhelming international importance of Japan, one must ask whether she can any longer ignore the problem of finding a more universal basis for community than offered by her indigenous traditions. Whatever shortcomings can be discerned in biblical religion, it has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to enlarge humanity’s sense of community. The question of whether Japan has the indigenous spiritual resources to enlarge her sense of community may be the most important confronting her in the coming Pacific era.
![[Chart: Structural change in Indian economy — shares of manufacturing, agriculture and services over time] Source: Rubina Verma, Journal of Development Economics, 2012](/YP_MEDIA:16-make-in-india-myth-vs-reality-media-1.jpg)
![[Chart: Discontinuous decrease in number of enterprises at 10 employees threshold] Source: Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, 2014](/YP_MEDIA:16-make-in-india-myth-vs-reality-media-3.jpg)
![[Chart: Ratio of value added by labour-intensive vs non-labour-intensive sectors in India] Source: Kochhar et al, 2006](/YP_MEDIA:16-make-in-india-myth-vs-reality-media-5.jpg)
![[Chart: Structural change in Indian economy — shares of manufacturing, agriculture and services over time] Source: Rubina Verma, Journal of Development Economics, 2012](/YP_MEDIA:15-make-in-india-how-to-make-it-work-media-1.jpg)
![[Chart: Discontinuous decrease in number of enterprises at 10 employees threshold] Source: Amrit Amirapu and Michael Gechter, 2014](/YP_MEDIA:15-make-in-india-how-to-make-it-work-media-3.jpg)
![[Chart: Ratio of value added by labour-intensive vs non-labour-intensive sectors in India] Source: Kochhar et al, 2006](/YP_MEDIA:15-make-in-india-how-to-make-it-work-media-5.jpg)
