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Home > Contents > Essay: Makarand Paranjape

Dharma and Governance

Makarand Paranjape

This paper is based on a presentation given at an international conference on “Religion and Governance,” held at the Fireflies Ashram, Bangalore, from 6th to 9th January 2009 and has the tone of an extempore presentation. Speaking extempore is usually the lazy conference goer’s excuse for not working on a written script beforehand, but once in a while it does allow for an eruption of true inspiration. The speaker then becomes not an individual but a point of reference that seems to catch a deeper meaning inherent in the audience. In India’s oral tradition, such was the normal mode of intellectual intercourse. Perhaps, it is precisely the performative power of live utterance that cannot quite be captured in its written enunciation. But even if writing were prior to speech, I should like this composition to be read as the record of an utterance. Since it is not a normal academic paper, there is no need for it to masquerade as such; yet, the commitment to convey ideas with a certain degree of rigour is not something that should ever be shirked even in such presentation.

I want to begin by reflecting not only on what I propose to do myself, but also on what we have done so far. Towards the end of our deliberations, perhaps, such self-reflexivity is appropriate, if not imperative. It seems to me that over the last two days we have had a number of presentations which, individually rich though they may be, have been somewhat at cross purposes. One reason for this, perhaps, is that we have not been able to speak very clearly about the two keywords in our topic, “religion” and “governance,” especially to link them in a very productive way. On the one hand we had several presentations coming from within certain faith communities, presenting certain traditions, and committed to certain points of view. By and large such presentations have been by people who though committed to them are not necessarily trying critically to engage with these traditions, but are often content only to explain or justify them. In other words, these talks have been in the nature of expositions of positions from within certain faith traditions, sometimes bordering on apologetics or defenses of these traditions. On the other hand, we have also had presentations which come from a completely different discursive and theoretical space, from what we might call a modern, academic, rationalist, secular, historicist perspective. The result, I think, is not a meeting of rivers, which would have been wonderful, but rather of two parallel streams. In India we believe that where rivers meet, the confluence is holy. To me, then, parallel streams only presage the possibility of a future border crossings and confluences.

But to observe the two streams more carefully, first we may consider what may be called, for want of a better term here, the Fireflies stream. We might remember the several interfaith meetings we have had here and at other places in and around Bangalore, bringing together people of different faith traditions. Some of the same people who are here today have also been here before. This Fireflies approach, then, is that of an inter-religious dialogue, of working to understand people from different positions and communities. The other, more secular, rational, even European perspective is what we can call the FPH stream. FPH, of course, stands for the Charles Léopold Mayer Foundation for Human Progress (formerly Fondation pour le Progrès de l’Homme, hence the acronym FPH), an independent civil society organization registered in Switzerland and operating out of Paris (1). FPH, to say the least, is attempting to build fresh way of addressing the problem of international governance. For those who don’t know, FPH initiatives are always somewhat like guerilla warfare! I mean, it is a small foundation which tries to play a much bigger, even crucial role in the creation of planetary futures by leveraging its size with the power and potency of its ideas. The FPH recognized before many world organizations and governments did that new thinking on governance is urgently needed because the old ideas simply do not work. They arrived at an understanding that the present systems and the old systems are failing, that the world is going through a major transition, and that the structures in place whether they are nation-state systems on the one hand, slightly bigger alliances of nations at the second tier, or international bodies like the United Nations—none of these is really equipped to tackle this global crisis. That is because these systems are unable comprehensively to address our complex issues and problems. Some of these failings have been identified in our own meeting and include economic, ecological, and ethical problems, all of which I think could be linked to governance if we follow the FPH line of thinking. For the FPH, however, it is important to be ahead of the ground reality, ahead of the rest of the pack, in fact, to anticipate and prepare for the future. In other words, even while statesmen, politicians, and agents in civil society are struggling to come to terms with the changing world, the FPH wants to present a number of different options, alternatives, ideas, which might trigger change and help build a better future for us all. While conventional academics is much more narcissistic and lacking in such a clear focus, it still harbors ambitions of being pragmatic, if not actually useful in the real world. Hence, even without an agenda as clear as the FPH, the academic presentations that we have heard may be aligned with its method or approach.

That is why I said that in this very meeting we see two discursive traditions in operation—the interfaith approach of Fireflies and the secular-rationalist but innovative FPH approach.

The difficulty, however, is that I am not entirely sure whether each understands or engages with the other. In fact, I am not even confident that I shall be able to mediate between them myself. Yet, in terms of style and substance I see myself as belonging neither to the well-organized religious or the efficiently disciplined academic group, though my professional affiliation is with the latter. Consequently, I propose to be neither as structured as some of my fellow-academics here nor as free-wheeling as some of the others we have heard. I think one of the advantages of our meetings here at Fireflies is precisely to offer the floor to different styles of sharing, without necessarily having to impose a rigid structure on everybody, which would prevent us from being not just creative but truly spontaneous as we engage with one another. So in terms both of style and substance, of what I want to say and how I am trying to say it, I would like to steer a middle course or mediate between the two approaches that I spoke of. As far as style is concerned, I shall, I hope, offer neither a completely unstructured reflection nor a very tightly structured presentation, with all the ideas following one another in a logical progression. In the matter of substance, I neither want to be the spokesman of a particular faith community nor of the secular academy. That is why I shall avoid speaking of governance from, say, a Hindu point over view. But, when we speak from certain positions, we usually end up trying to defend them rather than trying to get out of them. So rather than using the methodology of asking what does my tradition tell me about governance or what resources can it give me to address the issue of governance, I want to follow a different path. Of course, I might actually talk a little bit about some specific aspects of my tradition in relation to governance. But I shall also avoid taking the other side where one basically locates oneself in a “hard secular” framework, totally rejecting any kind or system of governance which is derived from a religious point of view. Rather, I would say that we need not just a post-religious but also a post-secular environment in which we can comfortably say that while we cannot go back to theocracies, neither must we succumb to secular dictatorships either. So, it seems to me that we might assume a more fruitful middle position where we can consider both religious and secular pasts as being resourceful and productive, each also posing peculiar problems. We must address religions because they are so troublesome, because we can’t wish them away, because they continue to be sources of conflict or confusion. Yet, we cannot also believe that wholly secular means of addressing them will solve the world’s problems either.

When we carefully reflect on both sides, secular and religious, we may sense a certain bankruptcy in either. Both religious and secular ideas seem to have outlived their utility. We know that, in large measure, many of these ideas are obsolete, even if some of them have perennial value. In their precepts, they may be of great, even enduring, significance, but in their practice they seem to be so inadequate in addressing the complexities of our times. And these complexities are such that we can’t just be Hindus, or Muslims or Christians any more. We partake, therefore, of many of these traditions simultaneously, even if we are not adherents or believers. That is because we know so much about one another today. Even if we are Hindus, or Muslims, or secular, or whatever—even if we define ourselves as atheists—we are no longer ignorant or mystified about those who surround us, the people of faith, who are believers. If we are believers ourselves, we know a lot about people who don’t believe. For instance, if we believe in God the Creator, we know a lot about those who don’t. Buddhists, for instance, don’t believe in a creator-God. Does that mean a Buddhist is a Kafir, a non-believer? What about the Jains who though deeply non-violent, also don’t believe in God? Are they going to the hell of the Abrahamic faiths? Can any Hindu really believe in hereditary caste any longer as a spiritual principle? We can’t dodge these issues. That is why I wish to reiterate that I do not see myself as representing or belonging to or speaking from the position of a person within a particular faith community, nor do I see myself as fully located in a secularist post-religious worldview either, where religions are either a source of inferior cognition or just of conflict. I think it is important to find a different locus of enunciation, to speak from a more enabling position. I hope to demonstrate such a location even as I speak.

To continue on a self-reflexive note, I now want to come to the context of our own meeting. As I said earlier, we are passing through unprecedented crises which do not affect all of us, not just one particular community or another. For example, global warming is not the problem of only Hindus or Muslims or of Indians or Americans or Australians. It’s everybody’s problem. Similarly, if we talk about the financial crisis, it is not just the problem of Buddhists or Christians or Russians, but in one way or another, it affects all of us. In India, for instance, we have seen this whole saga of “Asatyam” as everybody has been saying; a company which failed because its promoters siphoned off money from it (2). The Chairman of the company publicly confessed having done so. The government had to intervene, the law board and the ministry had to take over the management of the company, appoint a new set of directors, and ensure that, eventually, the company was sold off and the interests of the shareholders protected. Everyone in the media has seen this was seen as a failure of cooperate governance. So once again this word governance keeps coming up. We have just to cross the border to notice the disturbing fact of governments ceding temporal power and civic authority, not to mention the entire law and order administration to a fanatical religious group, the Taliban some months ago, letting them impose their Shariat in the beautiful Swat valley, the kind of Shariah that involves punishing women women and destroying 400 schools, versions of this nightmare we had seen in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan earlier (3). So once again we have faced some kind of failure of governance--corporate governance on the one hand, political governance on the other. In Bombay we have a group called Maharashtra Navnirman Sena led by Raj Thackeray, which has targeted outsiders, manhandled and beaten them up in defiance of the law of the land (4). What has the administration have been doing? They either turned a blind eye or failed to protect the rights of citizens, failed to safeguard not just the dignity, but even their lives. So you see another failure of governance closer home. What about the terrorist strike of November 26th on Mumbai?(5) Is that another instance of failure of governance? When you see large scale violence in the name of development, that is a failure of governance too—ethical, economic, and ecological, the kind of structural violence and the bitter fruits of development against which Medha Patkar, Sundarlal Bahuguna (6), and others have been struggling. Structural violence unleashed by certain model of development, or, forms of civil war, forms of incredible violence in societies all over the world—all these are linked to governance.

So, if one looks at all the different crises which affect us today, then, as I understand it, we might see that governance is at the root of many them. I think this is the point that the FPH wishes to make. Without disagreeing with this proposition, may I suggest that there is another way of looking at it?

Is it also not possible to say that underlying all these crises is not just the crisis of governance, but also a crisis of dharma, that what we are facing today is a dharmic crisis? This is where I want to come to my theses statement, to my main point. When we examine these two terms: dharma and governance, or to some extent, even religion and governance, we realize that both perform a similar function. The older meaning of the word religion is to cohere, to bind, and to direct. Dharma, which means to uphold or support, is also a principle of order. So, both dharma and religion have an intrinsic relation to governance. Dharma, of course, has a wide range of meanings, from the cosmic, as in Rta, to the individual, as in sva-dharma. In between, is the complex ordering of society, traditionally based on some form or the other of varnashrama in India, that is professional responsibilities, and stages of life. You will notice how I have deliberately defined varnashrama rather differently from the conventional notions of caste and hierarchy. I see no reason to be apologetic in reinterpreting my tradition. To complete my thesis, if both dharma and governance are ordering principles, then, in the modern context, it seems to me that they are in competition. The two domains overlap and contend with one another as sources authority and direction.

So, on the one hand, we could legitimately ask what the dharma of governance is. Or what is the overarching duty or the comprehensive responsibility of good governance? We could also ask a related question, which essentially is: what are the ideas inherent in certain dharmic traditions from which may be derived certain kinds of principles of governance? So you can see that dharma is itself a form of governance. It has, moreover, its own principles of operation, as governance has too. It is a way of ordering one’s life, and there are many different levels at which it works. We could, as I suggested, start with oneself, in which case we could talk of sva-dharma or one’s own dharma, which is linked to sva-bhava, one’s own character, personality, what one has inherited in terms of one’s propensities. Then we could speak of a wider circle of dharma which concerns our responsibility to the people who are related to ourselves. What is our dharma as husbands or fathers or sons, what is our dharma as brothers towards our siblings? Or as wives, mothers, daughters, or sisters? We could start with svadharma, then keep expanding the circles of dharma. As the circles of dharma expand, so does the self. The circle of the self can enlarge to include not only our family, our relatives, but also those we have undertaken to serve as a part of our professional obligations. So, as a teacher, I have to be responsible to my students and also to my university, which employs me. But the self can stretch beyond one’s profession to include one’s neighbourhood, society, city, state, country, continent, the planet itself, beautiful Mother Earth, and so on, until it embraces the whole cosmos. Such an expansion is also possible in time, not just in space. We could thus speak of the dharma of this instant or of the eon or the age, the yugadharma. So there are these expanding circles of dharma, all connected with our sense of our own selves and our responsibilities to others. These ideas, then, help us help us govern our lives. That is how dharma is a form of governance. To compliment this notion is the idea of the dharma of governance. This concerns the duties and responsibilities of those who are in positions of governance.

So we can see how these two topics, dharma and governance, collide on the one hand and collude on the other. Here we might advance our thesis to suggest that what we just saw as crises in governance may equally aptly be seen as crises in dharma. In a sense, some people have already acknowledged this, even if not in these exact words. Let me give you one or two examples. When we talk about the global financial crisis today, we know that in many ways this is also an ethical crisis. If we look at what some people have written about the financial meltdown, they acknowledge that it is linked to deeper moral matters. I read a very interesting article by Philip Delves Broughton, the author of What They Teach You in Harvard Business School, in the London Times. He says that if Robespierre, who sent so many to the guillotine during the French Revolution, were to descend to earth in order seek out and execute those responsible for the financial crises, he would find that most of them would have “three incriminating initials beside their names: MBA.” Broughton, himself an alumnus of Harvard Business School calls his fellow-MBAs “that swollen class of jargon-spewing, value-destroying financiers and consultants have done more than any other group of people to create the economic misery we find ourselves in.” (7) There are others who came to a similar conclusion. The question that did the rounds during those days was how come the brightest and the best of the world who were running Wall Street allowed the system to reach the brink of collapse and caused so much human misery? It was found that the moment a person entered the Harvard Business School he or she had an amazingly higher sense of entitlement and self-confidence than someone without the Harvard MBA. In controlled situations, when they were dealing with modeling and hypothetical situations, the Harvard management types were prone to much more risky behavior than the others. In other words, in real life they were likely not just be more confident of their own abilities or to take greater risks, but also feel justified in doing so because they went to Harvard Business School. Similarly, some have blamed the crisis on the “voodoo economics” that economists trained at the University of Chicago produced. These economists came up with the complex derivatives and esoteric mathematical financial models which nobody could properly understand and which were used to legitimate lot of risky subprime loans. I think the argument is that the financial crisis happened not in spite of the brightest people trained at the best universities; it happened because of these so called best and brightest. That is because many of these people in positions of great power and authority behaved very irresponsibly, without engaging fully with the risks involved. One reason that they were doing so was because there was a lot of pressure on them to produce results regardless of the consequences. They were being directed by the “official” religion of greed enshrined on Wall Street. So the financial crisis is an outcome of the irresponsibility of the managers of the world’s money and resources and fueled to a great extent by greed. Now if this sort of analysis makes sense, then we see that at the root of the financial crisis is a crisis of responsibility, of ethics, in short, of dharma(8).

III

This brings me to the heart of what I want to say. Is it possible, first of all, to try to understand the problems in governance today in different parts of the world and governance at different levels as a problem of dharma, as a crisis of dharma?

I think such a question brings us close to what Mahatma Gandhi Hind Swaraj, his 1909 classic critique of the modern Western civilization. Gandhi states very clearly that this is a civilization which is Godless. This is a civilization centred on bodily welfare and multiplications of wants. Gandhi is thus critiquing consumerism, much before the word came up. He says true civilization is that which points the human being to the path of virtue. The word he uses in Gujarati is sudharo. Sudharo is a wonderful word because it is compound of two; su which means good or positive and dhara, which means flow, so the positive flow. Sudhar also means reform. Again, we see a river metaphor, apt for “Meeting Rivers,” the Fireflies interfaith initiative. Gandhi was very conscious that the fight as he saw it was not just against British imperialism, but against two models of society, two types of civilizations. We could extend this point to suggest that Gandhi also wanted a face-off between two models of governance, which could be derived from these civilizations. Gandhi tells you why he does not like modern civilization. He does not like it because it is irreligious. And when you read the original Guajarati, the word that is used is adharma. I don’t think he meant Hindu dharma or Muslim dharma. By dharma he meant the sense that we are using it in this presentation, as moral order, as a way of life, as the ethical imperative. To that extent, for Gandhi dharma in the context of Hind Swaraj meant a certain common framework which many faith traditions of the world share concerning what might be considered a desirable life. What is the good life? Most faith traditions will answer this question in one way and, for instance, contemporary advertisements will answer it in another. Is the good life what we see portrayed in these advertisements? Is the good life, whatever those fake words and images of happiness, associated with some item of consumption or the other, promise? What kind of life is worth living? This is the question that Socrates also asked. It is a fundamental question. If we think that the good life consists of unlimited consumerism or consumption then one of the things that such a world does is to make it more and more difficult to ask questions such as what is virtue is or what kind of life is worth living. The space for these questions far from being central to the civilizational enterprise becomes very peripheral. Why? Because the main thrust of the society is driven by the creation of a lack, a want, a desire, which is then sought to be fulfilled by some “good” or the other. Note that “good” here is really quite “bad.” These white goods, consumer goods, other kinds of goods or even goodies are not all of them really “good” for us. Think about one of the worst of them all, white sugar. Its history was linked with slavery and indenture; today it is the cause of so many diseases and deaths in the world, not to mention tooth decay!

So if people are kept busy simply meeting their bodily comforts and slaving to earn enough to meet them, then they can be chained to this huge machine called modern civilization, with very little time for reflection on what is the meaning of life. Like all those people in the Matrix dreaming in cocoons that live in an ideal world but really being harnessed by the machine, we too seem to be enslaved for life, indebted for generations, paying for things we cannot afford and do not really need. So, the question of virtue or real happiness becomes inconvenient; it is not the kind of question that anybody wants to ask or if we do dare to ask it, as in T. S. Eliot’s poem, we are dubbed as misfits or freaks. Look at our own country. With the rise of liberalization and globalization nobody wants to talk about the poor in India. Sainath has written about this eloquently. The discourse of poverty which was central to our self-definition as a nation was eclipsed or marginalized over a period of just ten years. We forgot the ideals of sarvodaya and antodaya, the welfare of all, and the upliftement of the last and the least.

What Gandhi is saying in Hind Swaraj, then, is that a culture or civilization which makes it difficult for you to ask whether bodily welfare is what the true purpose of our life is or if there is any other kind of welfare more worthwhile is a civilization that he would like to oppose. He prefers a dharmic civilization, informed by dharma which is not just Hindu or Muslim dharma, but one which might include even atheists. You know that Gandhi had no problem with atheism as long as it was informed by virtue. There was a noble and virtuous man called Gora who was also an atheist. Before Gandhi met Gora, he used to say God is truth. But after he met a really “good” atheist, a fine and highly moral person, he started saying truth is God(9). So even if you are an atheist you still have some idea of dharma, even of “God” which for Gandhi was truth not a vengeful, bearded male in the sky. Truth for Gandhi derives from sat. Sat doesn’t mean some abstract principle. Sat actually means the nature of reality. Whether it is the structure of the universe in terms of matter--the protons, the neutrons, electrons, quarks, and so on, all of that is sat. Matter is sat. Whatever is is sat. If truth is what is and if truth is God, then dharma for Gandhi is based on what is, on reality, not on some dogma or abstraction. If such a notion of dharma becomes the informing force of a civilization, then such a civilization, according to Gandhi, would be a highly virtuous one.

Similarly, Gandhi wanted to put dharma at the heart of the struggle for svaraj, which is much more than political independence. Svaraj means self-rule, self-mastery, self-perfection, which results in illumination. Svaraj too is, thus, ultimately a question of governance. In terms of etymology it is a compound consisting of sva or self plus raj or rule. But raj, from which you get both rajan (king) in Indian languages and regnum, the same thing in Latin, actually means “to shine.” So king is a derived or secondary meaning; the king shines with power, hence he is rajan. Because power makes you shine; power was seen as something positive, for endowed with it, you could do a lot of good. The ancients didn’t see power always as corrupting or entirely bad. Hence, the primary meaning of raj is to shine, raj deepnoti; that is why the word for silver or that which shines is rajat. So, svaraj actually means to self-shining, or the self that shines. Thus svarat, which is the correct grammatical form because svaraj is a modern corruption of svarajya, refers to a person who is self-shining because she is self-illuminated. She shines with her own inner knowledge. The Upanishadic passages where svarajya is discussed, the word for the person with perfect self-control is svarat as opposed to anyarat, the person who is ruled by others or does not have self-mastery. Ultimately, I would argue, that even in the Upanishads, svarajya is about governmentality, but not in the Foucauldian sense, which is really an idea of bio-social control of the individual by the state through its authoritarian apparatus. In the Upanishad, the governmentality is internal, having perfect mastery over one’s own organs of sense and action. This is not a coercive control, but rather a beautiful liberative ordering or alignment of one’s own faculties leading to an inner luminosity.

This is what Gandhi speaks of even in his autobiography, the story of his experiments with truth. Svaraj involves sadhana or self-culture, on which Rabindranath Tagore wrote a book, collecting his Harvard lectures, the process of cultivating oneself until one attains mastery. Self culture means fighting against one’s own weaknesses, which is the true jihad, which means struggle. According to one of the Hadeeths, jihad-ul-akbar or the great jihad, while attacking one’s enemies in a holy war is the lesser jihad, jihad-un-nafs(10). The internal struggle to improve one’s self, to make oneself a human being is to me akin to the purusharthas, the cardinal aims of life for Hindus. Normally, these are listed as dharma (righteousness), artha (power), kama (pleasure), and moksha (liberation). But in a deeper sense, the purusharthas are the process of making-human, the struggle to become human through a process of tapas, askesis, or engagement with both internal and external challenges. Such engagement, also involves certain degree of suffering in order to strengthen oneself so as ultimately to achieve a certain kind of mastery. So Gandhiji takes this word, svaraj, with all these connotations, a word which has its provenance in India’s ancient spiritual traditions of self realization and self mastery, and brings it into politics. Rather, others before such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Lokmanya Tilak, and Sri Aurobindo had already done so, but Gandhi both modernizes and re-spiritualizes the term. Thus, he says that only those who are capable of governing themselves can form an independent republic. We may be obsessed with ruling over others, but we often do not know how to rule over ourselves. Gandhi’s ideas are not just about imperialism or how to overcome it, but also about an ideal republic made of self-regulating individuals. Svaraj to me means that you do not want to rule others, and you do not want others to rule you either. It is the third way—neither to be a victim nor a victimizer, neither to be exploited nor an exploiter, neither to be oppressed nor an oppressor. Needless to say, this third way is quite different from Homi Bhabha’s interstitial space between nations that diasporas occupy.

Svaraj leads to sarvodaya, the welfare of all. The svaraj model of governance starts with individuals, not with institutions or governments. Highly motivated, cultivated, enlightened individuals can form a society or a state which does not need policing, does not need external force, does not need too much governance. According to Gandhiji, such a society did and does prevail in India. Even today, how many police stations do you have for a cluster of villages? There may be for 10 or 20 or 30 villages with just one police station. Does it mean that they are crime-ridden? No, in fact, crime is very low in the countryside usually. So how does the system work? It works because individuals regulate themselves or are regulated by age-old norms of conduct of what is righteous, of sudharo or the flow of the good civilization of this land.

I shall conclude by saying that what India offered in the field of governance was neither the model of civic nationalism of Europe that may be traced to the French revolution, nor the romantic nationalism of the Germans that came later and was based on the idea of the “volk,” the people of a particular race, ethnicity, language, or religion. These two notions of nationalism do not work in India. What Gandhi and Aurobindo offered instead was a kind of dharmic nationalism, a nation based on a plural, broad, democratic, and participatory idea of dharma. Unfortunately, our Constitution, wonderful though it is, does not contain the word dharma at all. Dr. Ambedkar, considered its chief architect, was himself a Buddhist, so I wish he had included this word in our very Preamble. But Ambedkar was a modernist, unlike Gandhi; perhaps, he would have found such an inclusion inappropriate, if not embarrassing.

What I have attempted here is a preliminary sketch of the idea of dharmic governance taking into consideration some of the ideas of Gandhi. But if I were to develop this notion further, I would have to, sooner or later, focus the problem of rationality. Svaraj, which results in illumination, also opens up the possibilities of non-divisive integral rationality rather than a fragmentary rationality. That, however, is a project for the future, in more than one sense of the word—it must be done in times to come but it is also something we are probably not ready for as yet.

Notes/ references

1.	See their website http://www.fph.ch/en/presentation.html.
2.	Satyam Computer Services Ltd. was taken over by the Government in January 2009 after its Chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju, confessed to cooking the accounts and embezzling more than 2000 crores. Later, the company was bought by Tech Mahindra, a member of the Mahindra group. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahindra_Satyam
3.	By January 2009, the Taliban, after eighteen months of fighting, had established control of the Swat valley in the North West Frontier Province of Pakistan. Even today, fighting in Buner, an adjacent district within 150 km of the capital Islamabad. See http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/25/taliban-mingora-pakistan-swat-islamists; accessed 30th April 2009.
4.	In October 2008, activists of the Maharashtra Navnirman Sena thrashed so-called “North Indian” candidates who had come to Mumbai to appear for a Indian Railway recruitment test. One person was killed. In retaliation, Bharatiya Bhojpuri Sangh attacked the home of a Maharashtrian official in Tata Motors, Jamshedpur. After a national outrage, Raj Thackery was arrested on 21st October 2008. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maharashtra_Navnirman_Sena, accessed 21st November 2009.
5.	On 26th November 2008, a group of ten or terrorists attacked several targets in Mumbai, leaving over 173 dead and 308 wounded. The incident went on till the 29th of November when all except one of the terrorists was killed and the lone survivor apprehended. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Mumbai_attacks, accessed 25th March 2009.
6.	Medha Patkar and Sunderlal Bahuguna have struggled against big dams for several decades. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medha_Patkar and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunderlal_Bahuguna, accessed 1st September 2009
7.	The article was called “Harvard’s masters of the apocalypse” and appeared in The Sunday Times on1 March 2009; see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/education/article5821706.ece, last accessed on 24 September 2009.
8.	See for instance this transcript of a programme on the National Public Radio, which made a similar point: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101855316&from=mobile, accessed 23rd July 2009.
9.	Though the shift in Gandhi’s definition of God is well-known, few know that it was perhaps Gora who triggered it. I was told by his son in a personal conversation that his father was responsible for changing Gandhi’s mind.
10.	Some, however, dispute this, believing that the Hadeeth in question is corrupt; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jihad#cite_ref-21, accessed 3 June 2009.

Makarand Paranjape is Professor of English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Where the term ‘governance’ is normally looked at as associated with management, this essay recognizes that it is much more a moral issue and tries to look at it through the prism of religious thought. ‘Governance’ is a key term today because we know that we can no longer look to utopias for the world’s betterment. If the socialist utopia was discredited in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the utopia of the free market has been discredited in the past few years. Our plans for directing civilized society towards a viable future evidently need to be rethought. Among the various approaches to the issue of ‘change’ is one that believes that all change can only begin with the individual. While the philosophical validity of the approach cannot be doubted, one is still left wondering if action at the individual level can hasten change, especially when global warming, the overexploitation of non-renewable resources and the valorization of waste in the name of ‘economic growth’ are likely to spell doom to the planet well within this century. “If I change myself, will the rest of the world fall in line soon enough?” is perhaps the question that skeptics will ask. Has the market not become such a monster that it has actually tampered with the notion of the ‘individual’, increasingly defined by parameters related to consumption? Did many sages and thinkers like Gandhi and Aurobindo, cited by the author, anticipate the persuasive power that the market would assume. While appealing to the pristine ‘individual’, did they anticipate that the individual would be reconstructed by market forces? The valorization of greed by the market economy, for instance, might have been unimaginable to Gandhi. The issue of devising a system that will transform the individual into a thinking, moral being – rather than one simply given to consumption – is evidently one that needs attention.

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