Thoughts That Shape Power

This is an essay written by Varun (Bone of Empire @BotE85371688 on Twitter), an Indian-American friend who asked me to share it on brownpundits. I think it starts an important conversation..

Thoughts that Shape Power 

Once upon a time I worked in a defense think tank in New Delhi. It was a fun, fresh-out-of-college job. The pay sucked, but the conversation was always rich, and we had tea time twice a day. 

Every Friday morning we were encouraged to sit through a Research Briefing by one of our colleagues. Presentations lasted an hour and were divided into two parts – the presentation itself, and the question/critique period. Everyone — from fresh-faced interns (myself) to retired professionals — was encouraged to present their research or some other topic of interest and receive audience feedback. The variety of personal backgrounds at the institute guaranteed a range of quality for the presentations. What was most shocking to me, as an intern, was that senior researchers were often the sources of tremendous bullshit. 

One Friday, a scholar — whose name I will not mention — gave a presentation on the Indo-Bangladesh border. They offered detailed recommendations for securing the region, including drones, CCTV cameras, electrified fencing, checkposts, watchtowers, and more. The presentation lasted a full 30 minutes; the question period, which had been allotted the same amount of time, lasted only five. 

A retired army colonel simply asked, “What will all this cost?” The scholar was unable to provide a straightforward answer, and hemmed and hawed for a few more minutes before the moderator broke early for tea. 

I went back to my office and looked up the scholar’s research presentation, which was usually uploaded onto the institute website before the sessions. Her presentation had tickled something in the back of my mind — a sense of familiarity. Upon looking up her work and running a few Google searches, I realized that her presentation was essentially a copy-paste of a policy proposal about the US-Mexico border that was being debated in the United States. The price tag for the proposal was around $15 billion, without adjusting for the radically different geography of the Indo-Bangladesh border region. To put that in context, India’s military budget in 2011 was $36 billion, and this researcher was casually proposing that the country find half that amount to secure the Indo-Bangladesh border. 

Copy-pasting ideas isn’t particularly exceptional in Indian academia, but I didn’t realize how prevalent and brazen it was until that session. I knew that the Indian university system was notorious for lax ethical standards — plagiarism, data massaging, poor logic, and outright fabrication are all rampant. I did not realize until years later that the laxity was by design. 

 

You see, universities aren’t primarily places dedicated to the pursuit of truth and knowledge, although that is how they advertise themselves. They actually exist to train (read: indoctrinate) a country’s intellectuals across a broad spectrum of disciplines and allow them to network. They cultivate each generation of elite professionals to manage their country’s economy, security, education, and cultural institutions. Elite education systems freely circulate diverse ideas to maximize the possibility of students being exposed to useful ones, but are also supposed to provide students with tools to contextualize ideas. One eye gives you exposure, two gives you depth (three gives you insight, but that’s a whole different story). When properly supported with strong ethical standards that punish lying, plagiarism, and laziness, and professional standards that control egotism, status-seeking, gatekeeping, tribalism, and other antisocial behaviors, graduates from “finishing” institutes enter civic life and promote and develop ideas that are essential for a country’s prosperity and security. 

Indian universities successfully expose their students to the world’s diversity, but fail at contextualization, ethical, and professional standardization. Teaching students to keep one eye closed is intentional. Understand that all elite networks consolidate their power around a very narrow range of ideas — first principles that govern their behavior and unite them. Unfortunately, the very system of education that trains the elite also gives people the skills to totally reformulate the fundamental logic that allows the elite to remain united, and thus powerful. 

Since independence, powerful elite factions in India consolidated their power using first principles that were formulated by British and other Western intellectuals, who wanted to exploit the country and prevent the formation of political opposition. Their first principles were formulated to advance this agenda. Individuals who study and enter the workforce in environments where the paths to success are controlled by ideologues — and alternatives are, to put it diplomatically, disincentivized — have little reason to develop and gain support for new theories and models of understanding. Even when people do create new theoretical frameworks, they must then gain sufficient financial and social support from established patron networks. Thus senior researchers, students, or anyone else can lazily or maliciously promote bad ideas without worrying about unsettling established patrons. 

Instead of being the heralds of progress, instead of helping create an intellectual culture that could build an independent India, the higher education system reinforced colonial control systems. The rules and personal relationships that form the body of India’s intellectual institutions are being reformed, but the first principles that are the foundation of intellectual life are much more difficult to change. 

 

Limited Perspective 

An optometrist’s client barges into his clinic. The client is covered in mud, his clothes are torn, and he has cuts and bruises all over himself. He puts his brand-new glasses on the counter and says, “These glasses don’t work! I just got hit by a cart while crossing the street! I demand a refund!” 

The optometrist looks stunned and asks, “You couldn’t see the cart with your new glasses?” 

The client responds, “How could I? It hit me from behind!” 

Or as the old saying goes: you can only see what you look at, and you can’t look at everything at once. 

First principles are the ideologies that dictate how we look at the world; they are rules to which all other rules must adhere. The laws of thermodynamics, for example, are first principles in the material sciences. In modern politics, first principles are often defined in constitutions and describe a society’s ideals and aspirations, the boundaries of legitimate power, and the rights that society grants its people. Not all first principles are written; some are simply unquestioned social norms people follow. The foundational logic of a society is its culture, a word whose root literally means “to cultivate” — in this case, to cultivate a way of thinking and a way of doing. 

Societies express first principles through fashion, conventions of communication, and taboos. They mark the boundaries of acceptable behavior — often the boundaries of acceptable thought — in power exchanges, and are enforced by violence or exclusion. Access to elite networks, and all the privileges and material advantages that confers, depends on outwardly expressing and supporting those principles. 

In social studies and history, Indian scholars purposefully underemphasized the upheaval caused by British rule as a fundamental cause of rampant inequality in the country. Indian scholars, at the behest of the Indian National Congress, instead created a narrative based on caste dynamics, and then linked pre-colonial inequality to present-day inequality, neatly skipping over a hundred and fifty years of social engineering and misgovernance by the British. A deeper examination of their foundations quickly exposes the shallowness of this hypothesis. Yet this interpretation is used in Indian economic jurisprudence. 

Similar faulty logic, shaped by political ideology, is found in every field of the humanities. For example, India’s political divisions are studied as a left-right binary, despite the diversity of the political ideological ecosystem. The BJP is painted as a right-wing authoritarian party and compared to other autocratic parties in the West (namely Nazi Germany), while its opposition, the Congress, is viewed as a bastion of liberal democratic values. An actual analysis of positions would show a much more complex landscape, with both parties representing liberal, autocratic, and conservative positions under different circumstances. 

India’s economic policy, meanwhile, was trapped in a 75-year experiment with socialism based on economic theories borrowed from the Soviet Union and fringe Western intellectuals. Unquestioning adherence to these theories left India with deep and vicious poverty among the worst in the world. Once the economy was liberalized, the bureaucracy under the UPA I regime decided that India would not rebuild its manufacturing capability, but would instead focus on developing its service sector with the IT industry, based on theories proposed by the World Bank and several Western universities. 

The Indian elite adopted English as the language of business, scholarship, and power. They justified this decision by linking speaking English with access to international markets dominated by the United States and England. Don’t speak English? Good luck getting a decent-paying job, entrance to a top university, or access to elite social networks. Belief that English is the language of access is so deeply rooted that ethno-linguistic nationalists consider it more acceptable to speak than a different native language. For example, Hindi speakers are viciously attacked by Tamil and Kannada linguistic chauvinists. 

Where India’s post-colonial elite couldn’t assert direct control over the country’s intellectual spaces, they flooded them with misinformation — fabricated research, rumormongering, and propaganda — following Lenin’s tactic of “every idea being worth a thousand pages of writing.” In a battle for narrative control, quantity is always better than quality. 

Parroting ideas from the West is the easiest way to gain legitimacy among old elite circles in India, because the supremacy of the West was established during the colonial era. “The West is Best” is the first principle of their power, and mirroring Western language and ideas allows aspirants to access guarded avenues of prosperity. Curiously, it also allows the elite to access international elite networks and capital streams to support their local projects, but that is a tangent to explore later. First principles, at least on sociological levels, establish a standard that people use to determine affiliation — a single idea that doesn’t necessarily need to be articulated, but delineates the legitimate from the illegitimate. 

 

The Mission 

Although the British were motivated by profit to subjugate India, theft was only part of the project. A significant portion of the British elite also wanted to civilize Indians through religious conversion and Europeanization. Missionaries were given authority to establish schools to deracinate and convert Hindus. Communist writer Frantz Fanon described this phenomenon in his book The Wretched of the Earth, where he argued that the goal of European education in the colonial world was to create natives who were at their core European — they wore the skin of the native, but held faith in the mission of their oppressors. Fanon further explained that even after independence, the post-colonial elite continued to rule as their European masters had ruled, by exploiting the native population for their own benefit. 

If one only looks at the colonial era through a Marxist lens — that the era was purely about material gains — then Fanon’s theory is exactly what happened in India. The Indian National Congress was effectively created by the English to manage revolutionary activity and ensure a transition to an independent India ruled by people who held English values: in other words, an English-educated minority led by Nehru and his clique. However, when one looks past Fanon’s analysis, one sees the political environment was much more complicated. A Muslim elite who believed it was their mission to complete the Islamic expansion into the Indian subcontinent (under the Islamic revival/caliphate movement), and a communist elite who believed it was their responsibility to turn India into a communist paradise, also competed for power. Christianity, Islam, communism, and Euro-centrist Nehruvians all established power bases in India, drew resources from international capital, and pursued policies that were hostile to native political power. Strangely, the goal of these post-colonial factions was not primarily to extract resources, but to pursue what the British saw as their secondary mission — civilizing the country. 

Why these factions pursued ideological goals instead of focusing on purely material gains is a story unto itself, but suffice to say that their first principles are logically consistent. Indian elites whose worldview is defined by native first principles do exist and have gained power. However, the commanding heights of the narrative economy — namely the universities and media, where mass culture is shaped — are still largely controlled by non-native ideological forces. 

I’ve come to the realization, after many years of reflection, that the senior scholar at the think tank plagiarized US border policy because it was a very loud debate in the United States. Not only was the research publicly available, but potential political patrons would have heard about the debate. She could have just as easily chosen another country, but promoting something that was popular in the US was more likely to get her noticed. She advanced her career by publishing work from the West, and also served the interests of the elite by adding more noise to intellectual spaces and preventing actual border security reforms from being taken seriously. Useful idiots like her are common in Indian academia — not by accident, but by design.