Why India needs The Dalai Lama as its president

After the deeply distressing events of the past few months around issues of identity and religion in India, I think we are polarised beyond repair. I do not say this lightly but on the basis of a recognition of the specific nature of polarisation in the digital media age which is quite different from whatever strains and challenges we might have seen before.

Our divisions today are not merely along the lines of political interests, identities or even ideologies but they are linked fundamentally to our experiences and the understanding of reality itself. This, of course, is not unique to India but just as bitterly obvious elsewhere, such as in the US, too. The bizarre phenomenon of everyone’s bruised, angry, reactive, rapid-fire minds being “always-on” because of social media, compounded by angry TV show hosts and panellists, has weighed us down.

Depending on what channels you watch, whose Twitter handles you follow, and whose WhatsApp lists you are on, you are simply not going to see, let alone understand, the reasons for the pain, anger, or fear of others around you today. We are not all seeing the same events though we’re on our phones all the time.

Half of us are astounded that the calls for violence against a woman fail to evoke the slightest concern among the other half. Then there are those who are equally alarmed that the ruling party of a secular country can insist on “Sabka saath” while also seemingly condoning the unceasing taunting of fellow citizens for their faith.

I think that something is fundamentally, almost irrevocably broken now. We have (I use “we” inclusively for all Indians) rejected an “idea of India” that was perhaps never really truthful, inclusive, and fair to begin with, without an ideal of the Bharat that goes beyond unconvincing cliches and two-faced slogans.

After the madness and the ignominy, we are left stranded today on two deadly duds — a supposed “composite nationalism” that never really was, and a supposed “Hindutva” that is not going to be anything but destructive and self-destructive, if its proponents do not conduct a massive course correction exercise. Despite all that India and Indians have survived before, I think the different kinds of hatred today cannot be extinguished unless we find a deeper sense of ourselves than what our cultural and political climate offers today.

To put it plainly, there is no concept of a secular India on hand without the silent and sanctimonious acquiescence to the violence against Hindus as we have seen in Kashmir and elsewhere going along with it. Conversely, there is no concept of Hindu existence today, on the other side, without endless provocation.

We have no one to show us a mirror to our souls in our political or even broader public sphere.

What we need in our public life is a guru — not a mere sect leader, but a universal, humanistic visionary from the world beyond our mental and political borders, a vishwa guru who can teach us to be the vishwa guru our leaders say we are meant to be. We need someone who can hold India’s hand and restore its innocence again.

From the perspective of the presidency as an institution, the gesture of asking a cultural “son of India” rather than a strictly legalistically-defined Indian to represent its people would make for a tremendous affirmation of what it means to be Indian today beyond the old Eurocentric paradigms of ethnic and religious nationalism. How many liberal democracies have, after all, made a “refugee” their President?

From the perspective of international relations, one might be tempted to think of this as just a stick to poke at neighbouring countries. But that would be a blinkered view. Instead, it could seed once again the idea of India as an ideal that far exceeds its own territorial borders, much as Buddhism, art, trade, and culture did across Asia for centuries before.

From the perspective of Bharatiya civilisational history, the idea of a spiritual teacher playing a role similar to our modern presidency is not unknown. The Dvaita saint-philosopher Vyasa Tirtha sat on the throne of Vijayanagara briefly during Krishna Deva Raya’s rule because of the kind of trust that existed between the spiritual and political figures of the time. A widely respected and loved spiritual figure like the Dalai Lama doing both constitutional duties as our President and his own traditional duties towards his people and to humanity, in general, will inspire Indians and others to rethink their sense of duty not only to their government and country as abstractions, but towards each other.

Our planet has leaped from the age of colonialism to the Cold War to an equally cold and callous neo-liberalism all within a hundred years, or three generations. There is virtually no connection between people and the planet, people and people, and most of all within people themselves. At a time of global epistemic, cultural, and ecological crisis, the Dalai Lama still carries a message of kindness and happiness and love. As he says in The Art of Happiness, there is “another source of worth” in human beings, emanating from a sense of warmth and affection for one another rather than solely material parameters like wealth and status (or, if I may add, economic indicators and identity-slogans). Indian presidents like Ram Nath Kovind and A P J Abdul Kalam have symbolised India’s democratic ideals in one important manner. But what we need now is more than just that sort of representation alone. We need connection and compassion. We need to find worth in reality rather than propaganda. That’s why we need His Holiness The Dalai Lama to be President of India.

(The writer is professor of media studies at the University of San Francisco)