The Modi years have generated much delight for some and much anguish for others. So I thought we need an appropriate method to outline a way of judging them, at least intellectually. The Greek philosopher Aristotle allows us to do that.
He also allows us to see how contradictory the impulses of the last 10 years have been. The contradictions have arisen from the pulls and pressures that arise when your main concern is getting a job done, no matter how it’s done.
Despite all the debate and discussion and teeth clenching and hand waving, so far there hasn’t been an intellectual framework to judge them, only a lot of howling by some and gloating by others.
The arguments are framed in one of two ways. They are either in party political terms (BJP vs the Rest) or government vs citizens (ED, IT, CBI etc).
The Congress has summed this up as fear vs freedom. It’s pithy but not very clever because it is so easily refuted.
The BJP and the government have a different view of it all. They say good governance requires a measure of coercion so that good people don’t have to pay for the actions of the bad and further that the latter are suitably treated.
The matter of who decides who is good or bad has been left to the courts. This is a fair approach except that many bad things happen without breaking the law. This in fact is a huge problem.
So just as citizens can do bad things without breaking the law, so can governments, perhaps not as policy but certainly as practice. And this is the central dilemma that the Modi government has faced.
On the whole, its policies have been alright. But its practices have suggested a combination of callousness, incompetence and corruption. These three are the parts. The question is do they form the whole?
The Opposition says yes. The BJP says no. And in six months from now the voters will decide who they believe to be right.
That’s where Mr Aristotle comes in.
Parts vs Whole
The ‘parts and whole’ proposition is attributed to him. The gist of what he said was that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. I have always explained this in terms of an omelette, that is, it is more than the sum of the eggs you put into it.
That’s obvious enough. But what if some of the eggs you put in it are bad. Then does the implicit notion that the whole is better than the sum still hold good?
This is what the Modi government hasn’t been able to either counter or explain satisfactorily. The ends justify the means is at best a crude defence.
It ignores the fact that parts also matter even if the whole they eventually make up is greater than their sum. But that’s not the point. If the parts are bad, the whole won’t be good, no matter what your intentions.
This is true of many things that the Modi government has done. It’s quite a long list, actually. Calling it creative disruption or destruction may be correct but it’s not very sensitive.
And that is where the problem lies with the Modi government which has, all too often, taken a hammer to break a nut. To put it differently, it has all too often lost sight of the parts while obsessing about the whole. It thinks, like China, that the whole or final outcome is more important. The parts, or how the outcome is achieved, don’t matter.
The UPA was the opposite. It worried so much about the parts (or means) that it lost sight of the whole (the ends). It’s now claiming that as a virtue.
Two Aristotalian fallacies
Here a proposition from logic is useful. Again, it’s attributed to Aristotle. But, surely, some non-western thinkers too would have mentioned it.
It’s called the ‘Fallacy of Composition’. In a nutshell, the fallacy is that if you think something is true of the parts, it must be true of the whole as well. This is what the Opposition also believes. The parts are bad so the whole or the outcome must be bad.
But there is the opposite fallacy as well. It’s called the ‘Fallacy of Division’ and says that if something is true of the whole, it must be true of the parts as well. That is, the ends justify the means.
Where one stands vis-a-vis these formulations depends on the balance between the process and the outcome. The one is now; the other is in the future.