I Am the People

Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today

Partha Chatterjee

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231551359
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

The forms of liberal government that emerged after World War II are in the midst of a profound crisis. In I Am the People, Partha Chatterjee reconsiders the concept of popular sovereignty in order to explain today's dramatic outburst of movements claiming to speak for "the people."

To uncover the roots of populism, Chatterjee traces the twentieth-century trajectory of the welfare state and neoliberal reforms. Mobilizing ideals of popular sovereignty and the emotional appeal of nationalism, anticolonial movements ushered in a world of nation-states while liberal democracies in Europe guaranteed social rights to their citizens. But as neoliberal techniques shrank the scope of government, politics gave way to technical administration by experts. Once the state could no longer claim an emotional bond with the people, the ruling bloc lost the consent of the governed. To fill the void, a proliferation of populist leaders have mobilized disaffected groups into a battle that they define as the authentic people against entrenched oligarchy.

Once politics enters a spiral of competitive populism, Chatterjee cautions, there is no easy return to pristine liberalism. Only a counter-hegemonic social force that challenges global capital and facilitates the equal participation of all peoples in democratic governance can achieve significant transformation. Drawing on thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci, Michel Foucault, and Ernesto Laclau and with a particular focus on the history of populism in India, I Am the People is a sweeping, theoretically rich account of the origins of today's tempests.

1

Even Justice

Guilty Nations

I was an undergraduate at Presidency College, Calcutta, in the mid-1960s when I first read Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword.1 As far as I recall, the book came to the college’s economics and politics library as a gift from the U.S. Information Service, the agency that performed, during the years of the Cold War, the task of disseminating among the literate classes of the Third World the virtues of American culture. I cannot now exactly recall the impression the book made on me; it probably left me quite confused. I remember being struck by the vivid description of what Benedict (1887–1948) claimed was the Japanese national character, whose traits appeared to me familiar and, at the same time, strange. I had, of course, seen the depiction of Japanese violence and cruelty in the Hollywood war movies that were a staple fare in the 1950s and 1960s. I was also aware that the Japanese had been on the verge of invading and occupying eastern India, that they had carried out a few bombing raids over Calcutta that had led to many panic-stricken families fleeing the city, and that the scorched-earth policy of the British and their rush to forcibly procure food stocks for the garrisons had led in 1943 to one of the worst famines in modern history. All of these were still etched in the living memory of the city in which I grew up.2 On the other hand, I had also been brought up on stories about Subhas Chandra Bose, who was ousted by Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi from his position of leadership in the Indian National Congress (INC), was repeatedly put in jail by the British, managed nonetheless to make a dramatic escape from India, unsuccessfully sought help from Adolf Hitler, and finally raised the Indian National Army (INA) in Japanese-occupied Malaya and Burma. Among the grown-ups around me, few believed that Bose had been killed in an air crash along with his Japanese allies as they hurriedly withdrew from Southeast Asia after Japan’s surrender. Many harbored the thought that he was biding his time, waiting to make a triumphant return to his homeland. As I reached adulthood in the fervently anti-British years following India’s independence, I did not think of the Japanese as a defeated enemy.

What I do remember quite clearly from my first reading of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword is my astonishment that Benedict—after confidently declaring that once Emperor Hirohito had announced Japan’s surrender and urged his subjects to desist from further violence no Japanese would carry on the fight—did not once mention that the surrender had come only after the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I did not at the time know of the circumstances under which Benedict wrote the book, or indeed of who she was and how area specialists had been inducted into the American war effort. But in the mid-1960s, as my generation saw with increasing alarm and outrage the growing military involvement of the United States in Vietnam, this omission did not enhance in my estimation the credentials of the Columbia University anthropologist.

Reading the book today, one cannot help but be struck by the intellectual naïveté of an anthropological project seeking to identify a national personality for a large and complex society such as Japan. There was, of course, an external impetus. Benedict’s work with the U.S. Office of War Information had led her to produce in the years 1943–1945 a series of reports on the “national character” of Danes, Finns, Norwegians, Romanians, and Thais.3 Her study on Japan began in the same office, with Benedict deciding after World War II had ended to turn the material she had collected into a full-length book—one that she, according to her student Margaret Mead, cared more about than any of her other books.4 By then she had developed the idea of national character studies into a fully formed method; in the last years of her life, she launched a major project, Columbia University Research in Contemporary Cultures, which was funded by the U.S. Office of Naval Research.5 Indeed, this was part of a significant, if short-lived, trend in postwar American anthropology called culture and personality studies. Today, seventy years later, a critique of the assumptions underlying such a project would be obvious, and hence tedious. Here I want to focus instead on a specific character trait that Benedict emphasized in the Japanese personality.

There is a distinction to be made, she explains, between guilt cultures and shame cultures. In the former there are absolute standards of morality, and individuals are encouraged to develop a conscience of guilt. Immoral acts produce strong feelings of guilt in a person, who could then seek to find relief in confession or atonement. Needless to say, the culture of Protestant Christianity is an obvious example of such a guilt culture. Benedict goes on to say that in addition, persons in such societies might engage in bad or inappropriate behaviors that are not, however, sins against morality. Thus, in the United States, for instance, a person who is improperly dressed or says something inappropriate could feel chagrined, but this would not burden his or her conscience with guilt. Benedict argues that in a culture such as Japan’s, where shame predominates, people feel ashamed about behavior for which Americans would simply feel guilty. The overwhelming social sanction that produces proper conduct in such societies is the intense feeling of public shame. Confession or atonement would not relieve such feelings. On the other hand, if the violation could be hidden from others, there need be no shame.6

Benedict draws out at length the implications of Japanese shame culture, and especially the duty to protect one’s name, in a variety of situations that occur in families, educational institutions, professional life, politics, and warfare. The duty to protect one’s name enjoins the Japanese to respond to insults with retaliation, to not admit any professional failure or ignorance, and to always observe the rules of behavior appropriate to one’s station in life (116). Benedict explains how, given the powerful social sanction of shame, a person who feels defeated in his battle to vindicate his reputation will choose suicide as “a final argument to win victory.” That is why so many Japanese soldiers chose certain death in battle instead of being taken prisoner (168). She also explains why, after the Japanese realized they had lost the war,

they accepted the defeat and all its consequences with extreme good will. Americans were welcomed with bows and smiles, with handwavings and shouts of greeting. These people were not sullen nor angry.… The Japanese at the present moment are chiefly conscious of defending their good name in defeat and they feel they can do this by being friendly. As a corollary, many feel they can do it most safely by being dependent.

(170–71)

I must note that while Benedict repeatedly points out the contrast between the cultural norms of the West (the United States, in particular) and those of Japan, she does not do so in a crude Orientalist fashion. She is well aware of the specific features of Japanese culture and how they differ from those of China, India, Indonesia, Thailand, and the Pacific islands. Benedict also notes, at various points, the cultural differences among various Western countries and how some of them may, in fact, be closer to Japanese norms than others. Even though she does emphasize the fundamental importance of hierarchy in Japanese culture and its contrast with the value put on equality in the United States, she does not, like Louis Dumont, for instance, elevate the difference to two opposed but universal normative paradigms of Homo hierarchicus and Homo aequalis.7 Benedict stays close to her ethnographic material, avoids universal abstractions, and generalizes only at the level of what she calls the national character. If I am allowed to speculate a little, I think that at the end of World War II, with the United States thrust into a position of global leadership and the world poised on the brink of decolonization, Benedict was imagining humanity as a congeries of national peoples.

The explication of shame, and the corresponding virtues of duty, honor, loyalty, etc., occupy a large part of the text of The Chrysanthemum and the Sword. The opposite sentiment of guilt is described only in its manifestation as an inner feeling of individual conscience. Benedict does not dwell at all on the other aspect of guilt in Western cultures—namely, law and punishment. Guilt is not merely a matter of interiority; it also requires public discovery, proof, identification, and punishment. These are among the essential social instruments for ensuring conformity to norms and the deterrence of immoral conduct. With regard to postwar Japan, Benedict makes, in the last chapter of her book, an impassioned plea to the American authorities for not adding further humiliation to the pain of defeat, for extending a generous helping hand toward economic reconstruction, and for not attempting “to create by fiat a free, democratic Japan” (314). She is skeptical about the usefulness of democratic machineries such as popular elections and representative legislatures, and suggests that it might be possible for Japan to extend civil liberties and provide welfare to the people by suitably reinterpreting its traditional institutions rather than “on the basis of Occidental ideology” (302–3). She does not mention that even as she was writing her book, preparations were underway in the ruling circles in the United States to establish by law the guilt of the Japanese in waging wars of aggression against other people and to punish those among their erstwhile rulers who were found guilty.

The Inconvenient Judge

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East was convened in 1946 on the same principles as the Nuremberg trials, with a few significant differences. In addition to ordinary war crimes recognized in international law by virtue of the Hague and Geneva Conventions, Nuremberg introduced two entirely new concepts: crimes against peace (i.e., waging a war of aggression) and crimes against humanity (i.e., inhumane acts committed against civilian populations). After Japan’s defeat, not only were some 5,700 Japanese tried for conventional war crimes and 920 executed, but also the decision was made to follow the Nuremberg example and try the principal Japanese military and political leaders for crimes against peace and against humanity.

There was no meeting such as the London Conference in 1945, where representatives of the four Allied powers drew up the charter for the Nuremberg trials. Instead, General Douglas MacArthur as supreme commander of the Allied forces in Japan decreed a charter for the Tokyo trials along the lines of the Nuremberg charter. A significant difference was that whereas at Nuremberg there were four judges representing the four Allied powers, it was decided that at Tokyo as many as eleven countries would be represented on the bench. The list is interesting. Besides the United States, which had been Japan’s main adversary in the Pacific theater, and the Soviet Union, which entered the war against Japan at the very last stage, the three imperial powers whose colonial possessions had been seized by the Japanese (Britain, France, and the Netherlands) were represented. Australia and New Zealand, both British dominions whose mandated territories in the Pacific the Japanese had occupied, found seats on the bench. So did Canada, another British dominion. China, represented by the Kuomintang government, was the principal Asian country on the tribunal that had suffered Japanese aggression. Two last-minute additions were India and the Philippines. At British insistence, India was included as a country that had contributed numerous soldiers and huge resources to the war effort; besides, the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, a British Indian territory, had been occupied by the Japanese during the war. Even though India was on the verge of independence, in 1946 it was still under British rule. To further increase the representation of Asian countries that were victims of Japanese aggression, the Philippines was also brought on to the tribunal; that country had just established itself as an independent republic after Japan had withdrawn and the United States had relinquished its sovereignty claims.

The Tokyo trials began in May 1946 and lasted more than two years. The judgment was delivered in November 1948. Eight of the eleven judges concurred in finding all but two of the twenty-five accused guilty of conspiring to wage aggressive war; all twenty-five were found guilty of conventional war crimes. Former Japanese prime ministers Tojo Hideki and Hirota Koki and five generals were sentenced to death. Three of the judges dissented: Henri Bernard of France disagreed with the decision not to indict the Japanese emperor; B. V. A. Röling of the Netherlands, while accepting that aggressive war was a crime, did not accept the reasoning offered by the other judges; and Radhabinod Pal of India absolved all of the accused of all charges. Significantly, a single judgment was delivered as the tribunal’s finding and not as a majority judgment; the dissenting judgments were not published.8

Justice Pal explained his views in a set of public lectures at the University of Calcutta in 1951 and independently published his dissenting judgment in 1953.9 Born in 1886 in a poor family in a village now in Bangladesh, Pal taught mathematics for a few years before entering the legal profession. He served as the officiating judge of the Calcutta High Court for two terms between 1941 and 1943.10 By then he had established a reputation as a tax lawyer, a scholar of Hindu family law, and a professor at the university’s law college. From 1944 to 1946 he held the prestigious position of vice chancellor of the University of Calcutta and apparently had a brush with Richard Casey, the governor of Bengal, who walked out of the university’s annual convocation ceremony after being offended by certain politically inflected remarks in Pal’s speech.11 After the Tokyo trials, Pal came to be recognized as an expert on international law and was a member of the International Law Commission set up by the United Nations from 1954 until his death in 1966.

There is a story behind Pal’s selection as the Indian judge on the Tokyo tribunal. When the War Department of the British Indian government was asked to recommend a name, it approached a few retired high court judges in India, all of whom refused, apparently because they were concerned about the politically predetermined nature of the trial. The War Department then sought names of serving judges from the various high courts, and Pal expressed an interest. After his name was approved, doubts were raised about his suitability since he had been only an officiating judge. Yet by then the deed was done. It seems unlikely that the British authorities were aware of Pal’s political views.12

In fact, it is clear from what is known about him that he did not have any explicit affiliation with any political party or leader. Ashis Nandy, who in 1990 wrote an essay on the significance of Pal’s judgment and searched for his personal history, was unable to find anything more than a broad nationalist commitment, with perhaps a tinge of sympathy for anticolonial armed struggle typical among nationalists of his generation from Bengal.13 Nariaki Nakazato, in an attempt to demystify the image created in Japan of Pal as an impartial and courageous defender of Japan’s innocence in World War II, has since tried to piece together from sketchy and often speculative bits of evidence a story of Pal as a conservative anticommunist with strong sympathy for and even links with right-wing Hindu nationalism.14 This tendentious account flies in the face of known facts, which suggest that Pal’s political views as expressed in his judgment were utterly commonplace in Bengal in the 1940s. Japan’s role in World War II was judged by most Indians alongside the history of the colonial occupation of Asian countries by British and other European powers. The INC refused to endorse the British war effort in World War II and, despite questions raised by some on the Left, launched a militant campaign against the British in August 1942, even as Japanese forces were poised on the eastern borders of India. The anti-British sentiments were magnified when Bose arrived in Singapore in October 1943 to take over leadership of the INA, which consisted of Indian soldiers captured by the Japanese and volunteers recr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Statement
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Even Justice
• 2. The Cynicism of Power
• 3. “I Am the People”
• Afterword: The Optimism of the Intellect
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index