Why India Should Add a Decolonial Twist to Policy-Making

Guest Post by Abhivardhan

At times it becomes a common norm that if something antithetical to a set of identity groups has occurred in general, a good set of people believes that their society should copy and paste it completely. Some people ponder upon it, while some do not, ending up in various forms of second-order and third-order problems in policy implementation and social control, if at all. India’s history for more than 2 centuries has been pretty mixed and divergent, and since the Indian people under the current establishment in New Delhi are desperate for India to achieve the golden status of a high-end state, we still see that we usually fail in doing that. Why does it happen? And what can be learned out of this? The article is a colloquial discussion dedicated to a realist angle over a simple question – “Should India as a civilizational-constitutional state clone idea-models to various extents, and if yes/no, then what should inspire the Indian psyche?” 

Multipolarity & Multi-alignment

The notion of multipolarity is not a doctrinal achievement of any state in general, nor does it exist as some random political doctrine. Instead, we should it as a reasonable state of mind of ‘realpolitik’, which for years since the 20^th century, has been deluded into various forms of colonialism, collectivism, and idea centrism. Ideological obscuration, dissection of a global community in whatever way one establishment believes in (as it was when the United Nations was formed, even if for any good reasons) and decaying the indigenous roots or aspects of some civilizations in the name of development or political democracy, which often is owed to Henry Kissinger, whose approach of international law and multilateralism – like that of Kant, ignored how complex adaptive systems work. For India, the journey since 1945 has not been easy, but still, it can be said with some limited confidence that India’s foreign policy is now becoming civilizational. 

This can be seen throughout the trends in the statements delivered by various Indian diplomats, including the current Permanent Representative for India at the UN. India’s statement on transitional justice as a concept in international law has not been a due conciliation of the foreign policy status quo, which was cemented in some way by diplomats and leaders like Barack Obama, Samantha Power, Angela Merkel, and Nicolas Sarkozy. Instead, India has started acknowledging that despite the fact that it has the least to compete, and is trying to enumerate its own visions of an information society, knowledge society, and creative society. However, while India is developing its foreign policy considerations with utmost humility, it has to be admitted that there is a reasonable lack of vision of a long state or a long India, as some people call it. 

The same can be applied in many cases. For example, India has signed (and ratified) some significant international human rights treaties. It is high time it has not reasonably developed good and cogent scholarship on what could be an Indian cultural understanding of human rights. India’s interpretation of human rights does not need a guilt trip that the West used to have for a long time when it comes to women’s rights, the LGBTQ community, and even various minorities whether religious, cultural, linguistic, etc. 

The reason why Europe reveres the Protestant movement and various revolutions which occurred centuries ago, which includes figures like Rousseau, Washington, Martin Luther, and others, is just because their three-generation theory on human rights has always been based on the premise that enforcing and gaining human rights is an activist tendency, which must be embraced. We cannot say India never had such a history because effective research could be needed. However, while the navigation of freedoms and libertarian thought in the West is consequentialist, this mode of thought reflects in the way Western countries understand and interpret the realpolitik as a ‘white guilt’. India, however, can change trajectory by showing the world that the existence of human rights should be cyclic, and liberties must be creatively coordinated and manifested but also disrupted & manipulated. There have been some significant statements on the emergence of the ‘new’ world order by various Indian diplomats and leaders, and they range from one UN body to another. The WHO, UN Security Council, UNAOC, UN Human Rights, WTO, and other such UN bodies and groups can be some good examples. 

Second, we never realize that India’s benefits as a decentralized society predominantly, are more than the demerits. A bottom-up escalation of liberties, law enforcement, and economic development benefits India in many possible ways. However, the colonial nature of the establishment prevents us from assessing and embarking upon how to suggest novelties in the current international order. Even the suggestions made by India on WHO reforms, terrorism, budgets in peacekeeping, etc… have been exemplary, despite the fact that it might be somehow conciliatory to the colonial fashion of the Indian foreign policy since Menon and Nehru.  

The United Nations suffers from coloniality, and if the institution has to exist, then India has to lead reasonably, by not copying an imperialist intent or motive from the US, China, Russia etc… but through a compounding strategy, which is reminiscent in the most so-called disorganized MSMEs in India (vendors for example) – the naturalistic aesthetics of various performing art forms & the diversification of various vertical and horizontal hierarchies in problem-solving and design thinking. We have to understand that the effect of coloniality is always top-down, but it does not mean your constituent character is lost completely. Decolonization is a reasonable option, and it must be achieved by India even in the avenues of diplomacy.

The Continuation of a Colonial State of Mind

In a legal sense, we can say that India is a sovereign democratic republic, with a constitution, with a highly interpretive preamble, unfortunately, which hardly makes any sense in policy matters. Now, there is no doubt that preambles and keywords in a basic law resemble many things and must have an overarching structure, which is why common law is prominent in India. However, a constitutional policy should be cyclic and self-cultivating. It is futile that concepts like constitutional morality and the Basic Structure are being ridiculously challenged for unclear reasons to define some tangible intangibles in Indian constitutional jurisprudence. Doing that is unreasonable and a clear embrace of the divide and rule policy that the British imposed and exploited in India because on questions related to sovereignty, separation of powers, and the rule of law, India’s constitutional policy should be strong, robust, and not fashionable for colonial mischief or intent that the state is the oppressor every time. 

This is also one of the reasons why decoloniality in Indian constitutionalism is important. It is futile to interpret the idea of fundamental rights in India in a colonial-activist masquerade because doing that is an aesthetic assumption that India’s history and civilizational basis have been oppressive. It can happen in the United States and Europe, because the way the West works is to create cycles of consequentialism to achieve some intangible ends, thereby losing focus after achieving them. Also, the civilizational basis of India should not be based on limited rhetoric of copying the model of the West, China, or any such civilization because Indic individualism and nationalism, first – has to manifest de-centrality, second, has to be culturally confident and multi-modal, and third, should weaponize neutrality, even if it becomes a so-called paranoid state even if India does not stand in the good books of a good number of intellectuals. 

Secularism, as a concept, is not anti-faith, and nobody can secularise its history per se. At the same time, India should ignite and perpetuate its organic model of social cohesion with a good rule of law administration at the local level. If India believes it should ban or nationalize Big Tech (not startups or emerging tech sectors), it has to frame a reasonable policy, which ensures that the ban or nationalization is reasonable. For example, banning Twitter in India is not unreasonable because the law is clear: no foreign company can impose its own understanding of the law in India. They can go to the courts for redressal, but it has to respect the law of the land. Even nationalization doesn’t have to be complete but can be partial. 

If social media is not only behaving like technology but also as media, then it loses many of the privileges of solely technology platforms, because then it comes into the realm of public utility. Whatsapp-like apps have a different design because chatting platforms do not ontologically behave like Twitter, Reddit, or Instagram. But social media platforms, which do provide advertising opportunities and algorithmic virality that have the potential for monopolization, may require background-checks and enforcement mechanisms. Even banning content or moderating it is editorializing the content may be a potential path. No community guidelines or terms and conditions matter because they cannot be a ground to demean or demolish any rightful concerns for effective redressal, and their technocratic guarantees do not justify unchecked banning or moderation unless the state instructs to do so.  But there is a big angle to the private censorship issue, which has not been effectively addressed by the Government of India for now, which is ethnocentrism & digital-cultural coloniality. 

It means that any interface, systemic, algorithmic, and others of a social media platform (assuming it is a technology platform) provokes or shows some generic biases in the way it amazes people to interact. That is why banning TikTok was not just about the clash in the Galwan Valley in June 2020, but also was in relation to the recommendations system, which clones people’s creativity and content to a vicious extent. People could assume that freedom of speech has to be protected at a first-order level by letting the users use the app. 

However, if your user base is global, then just because you ensure that people interact and globalize their conversations, it should never be weaponized through algorithms and the archetype of the system, which unfortunately Twitter and other such tech giants do. People may also say that the universality of some ideas and principles should exist since we live now in a globalized world. However, globalization has always been there – for centuries. In addition, protection of freedom of expression must be decentralized and localized at first if not universalized at operational levels. The absolutism of freedom of speech can be recognized easily on paper – but how the policy framework develops would be the real question. India should focus this aspect on protecting the freedoms when big tech promotes digital and algorithmic coloniality across the globe. Generalization is a problematic aura in constitutional law and international law, which has to be avoided at best. Some dualism in approaching policy issues would make India creatively competent to show how the activist or alarmist tendencies in the galaxy of freedoms must be replaced by a decentralized, amicable form of freedom protection, where group rights and individual rights by definition, never clash.

The second issue, ethnocentrism, is also of much importance. Ethnocentrism involves imposing upon or viewing the indifference of a group of people a set of value-chains or systems and presenting a superiority complex against the group of people. Therefore, it becomes essential to understand that a free and open cyberspace should be free of ethnocentric policies, where cultures are misrepresented as narratives to colonize the mental and metaphysical space of the human mind in general. A book on AI and Power calls it rightfully a ‘moronization’ of the human mind, through artificial intelligence, which means to mechanize all the tangible and intangible sources of cultural and individual-collective human heritage into a technocratic colonial framework. In one word, we can call it The Matrix as well.  India therefore should weaponize its constitutive stance to protect the biological and individual integrity of its citizens, by ensuring more checks and balances. 

What Lies for India’s Exceptionality in a Multipolar Order?

An optimistic yet realist analysis of India’s present condition would be important to assess which kind of exceptionality India has inherited or possessed in the 21^st Century. Here are some examples of exceptionality that India possesses in general:

• The United States is a highly unreliable ally to India and to achieve some gains in the Indo-Pacific, the US needs a comprehensive Indo-Pacific strategy, which the Biden Administration does not have. The US, therefore, needs India at an equal level to make QUAD successful;
• Europe has lost its way in democratizing the geopolitical relevance and aims of the EU despite France’s reasonable foreign policy work and Germany’s pro-China ambitions. A French vision of the Indo-Pacific and the cooperation between India and France is one aspect that is reasonable enough. However, as a civilization, the Indo-European stretch in Eurasia should be remembered and led by India, by galvanizing its soft power in certain reasonable sectors of economy, politics, society, and technology, since the EU cannot sustain the Chinese values with their way of life and imperfection;
• India suffers from coloniality, but if it tries to bring about reasonable changes in its constitutional policy, which it can, then rejuvenating constitutionalism in a bottom-up manner would also show the exemplar of the Indian polity.

India represents developing economies openly in various multilateral bodies. Multipolarity does not mean there is no America-centric global order, but it simply means that India can pave its own way and enable capacity building to influence the global order in a completely different manner than anyone could imagine. However, we should never have a utopian and unrealistic way of determining Indian exceptionality lest India falls into some of the pitfalls of American exceptionalism.

Abhivardhan is the Founder and Chairperson of the Indian Society of Artificial Intelligence and Law as well as the President of the Global Law Assembly

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“Imperialism leaves behind germs of rot which we must clinically detect and remove from our land but from our minds as well.”

-Frantz Fanon