{"id":200924,"date":"2013-10-31T21:25:45","date_gmt":"2013-10-31T15:55:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tehelka.com\/?p=200924"},"modified":"2013-10-31T21:25:45","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T15:55:45","slug":"do-we-really-feel-empowered-by-non-violence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/do-we-really-feel-empowered-by-non-violence\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Do we really feel empowered by non-violence?\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Photo:
Jaswant Singh,<\/strong> 75 Senior BJP Leader Photo:<\/strong> Ankit Agrawal<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nEDITED EXCERPTS FROM AN INTERVIEW<\/strong>
\nOne of the last lines of your book, \u201cPrincipal purpose and objectives of our foreign policies have been trapped between four lines: the Durand Line, the McMahon Line, the Line of Control and the Line of Actual Control\u201d, is quite telling.<\/strong>
\nThe confinement is twofold, or multifold, really. India lies at the crossroads of four collapsed empires, all of which have left a detritus of the consequences of their collapse, which we are confronted by. The first to collapse, early in the 20th century, was the Qing Dynasty. Then, about 1920, the great Ottoman Empire, which had at one time stretched up to Iberia, collapsed. The consequences of that were diverse \u2014 not just the Khilafat movement \u2014 but we never studied it. The third was the British Empire, which partitioned us, and the fourth is the collapse of the great Soviet empire. The consequences of these distill themselves into India\u2019s confinement between four lines. The book is an attempt to identify these consequences. We lack a strategic sense, because we lack a sense of territory. We lack a sense of history. We lack a sense of what geography causes to a country\u2019s policies. Geography really is the progenitor of history; it\u2019s the fundamental contributor to policy.
\nYou write that an unthinking allegiance to Gandhi\u2019s non-violence caused the concept of state power to get emasculated\u2026<\/strong>
\nYes, because we don\u2019t really follow him. His non-violence was not a debilitating creed. It was, in reality, an empowerment. Do we really feel empowered by non-violence? We all say we are essentially non-violent, but when you look around India today, or in the past 60 years, we are a violent land. This leads to a schizophrenic attitude for the nation.
\n
\"

India At Risk<\/strong>
Jaswant Singh<\/em>
Rupa
286 pp; Rs 595<\/strong><\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nI understand, but in what way would you say was state power emasculated?<\/strong>
\nDuring the Second World War, for example, Gandhi wrote a letter to the king, published in the Anandabazar Patrika<\/em>, advising him that if the Germans invaded Britain, they should vacate their land. It went to an extreme, and did influence a lot of the country\u2019s thinking. I carry it further. There is another place in the book where I say that after 1857, there followed a great disarming of India. The carriage of arms, personal weapons, was never a form of offence. Though an object of male adornment, it was a necessary part of our identity. I remember when I was a minister my mother was sick. After visiting her, whenever I left for Delhi, I would go and bid her goodbye, and she would ask me, \u201cShastra<\/em> (weapon) to hai, beta?<\/em>\u201d It wasn\u2019t as if I was threatened, but it was routine in our part of the world for everyone to carry a shastra<\/em>.
\nHow was disarming our citizens a bad thing?<\/strong>
\nIt took away the self-reliance of our citizens. The Mughals had four-and- a-half million men available for instant recruitment.
\nThe right to bear arms has been debated for decades in the US\u2026<\/strong>
\nThat is a perversion. Don\u2019t use a perversion as an example. All of us have been brainwashed into thinking that should we go down this path, India will erupt into violence. It won\u2019t!
\nSo you are proposing giving arms to the citizenry as a legitimate form of national defence. Already, cases of road rage often escalate into violence.<\/strong>
\nI do believe that there has been a loss of confidence in our citizens. We must let them protect themselves. What you are talking of is an urban sickness, while 75 percent of the country lives in villages.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In his latest book, India At Risk, Jaswant Singh points out the various security challenges our country continues to face in a greatly uncertain world. India, he says, is fundamentally wired not to worry about defending itself, and civilian control of the military has been incompetent, leaving the institution under a perennial identity crisis. He tells Ajachi Chakrabarti that a major reason for this is a blind faith in Mahatma Gandhi\u2019s ethos of non-violence<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":200933,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8040,7056,8486,5188,2746,7622],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200924"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=200924"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/200924\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=200924"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=200924"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=200924"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}