There was a time, when politics was a vocation that drew the brightest and most idealistic in society, charged with the dream to serve the larger good. Sadly, those days are long gone. Successive generations have also begun to take, understandably but regrettably, a very dim view of religion. There are innumerable instances of religious gurus and priests being exposed for morally bankrupt behaviour. The misuse of religion for narrow political gain — across the political spectrum — has made the waters even murkier.[wptelegram-join-channel link=”https://t.me/s/upsctree” text=”Join @upsctree on Telegram”]
In an age where both politics and religion have suffered such an enormous decline, Babasaheb Ambedkar offers us an example to learn from. For Ambedkar, the challenge of social revolution was inextricably bound to the art of inner transformation.
Ambedkar’s spirituality did not allow for a crude separation of the personal and the political. Ambedkar’s insistence on a spiritualisation of human life constitutes the truly notable radicalism of his political struggle. This is his most significant contribution but also his most forgotten legacy. Learning from Ambedkar can inject both our politics and religious traditions with a more wholesome dynamic and contemporary relevance and respect.
Meaningful politics in an unjust society comprises endeavours to alter the balance of power in favour of the deprived and oppressed. How radical such an attempt is, turns on how comprehensive, how universal and how enduring is the vision of transformation. Do we get to experience freedom at the deepest level? Or do we continue to remain caught in the endless cycle of desire, fulfilment and lack — that becomes an eternal source of bondage and unfreedom, even more overpowering than any external servitude?
It is this striving that drew Ambedkar to various religious traditions and finally, to Buddhism. This was not for him an end-of-life realisation, as some believe.
As early as 1936, in his classic work Annihilation of Caste, in a passage generally ignored, Ambedkar said: “I believe true religion is the foundation of society, the basis on which all true civil government rests, and both their sanction.” He reiterated this view 20 years later: “For the religious system although today is unrelated to the secular system, yet is the foundation on which everything secular rests since the secular system cannot last very long unless it has got the sanction of the religion however remote it may be.”
Lest there be any misunderstanding, lets be clear that Ambedkar is not making a case for a theocratic state. His emphasis is on the fostering of values that would engender a humane society, based on loving kindness, an impeccable Buddhist virtue. The question he asked himself was: What would foster such a society, imbued with these values? And his clear answer was that this requires a process of inner transformation, without which all activism and all social engineering would, sooner or later, hit a dead end.
He was drawn to the religious traditions because the change they seek is more fundamental than those limited to transforming specific structures of power, whether based on gender, class, caste, race, region or community. This is what makes his spirituality so powerfully radical in political terms. Ambedkar’s was a ceaseless struggle to arrive at a praxis that would enable liberation from the world of sorrow, not only for the Dalits, but for all beings on Earth.
For Ambedkar, the main hindrance to human liberation is what he calls the delusion of self: “There are two forces prevalent in Society: Individualism and Fraternity.
Fraternity is a force of opposite character. It consists in a sentiment which leads an individual to identify himself with the good of others whereby the good of others becomes to him a thing naturally and necessarily to be attended to, like any of the physical conditions of our existence.”
But for Ambedkar it was of the greatest significance how this fraternity was to be built, and he rejected both Gandhi and Marx in this respect. He wrote: “One has to choose between government by force and government by moral disposition.
The Buddha’s way was not to force people to do what they did not like to do although it was good for them. His way was to alter the disposition of people so that they would do voluntarily what they would not otherwise want to do.” Thus, without an inner transformation of the individual, social revolutions remain incomplete and unsustainable.
Force and compulsion, even if moral (as with Gandhi), do not carry change for very long. Our morality must be based on an understanding of the nature of reality, the science of life, which is what we discover in religious traditions, when we study them with requisite seriousness.
It may be best to view Ambedkar’s legacy within a pantheon of activists who brought reconstructed spiritual resources to address the key challenges of their own time and context. These include Gustavo Gutierrez and Paulo Freire and their theology of liberation in Latin America.
And Martin Luther King, who argued that “power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic”. This understanding of power helps King positively formulate the unbreakable bond between love, power and justice. He said: “Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love”. This is quintessential Ambedkar!
As is the work of anti-Vietnam war Buddhist monk Thích Nhất Hạnh and African-American Christian Buddhist feminist, Bell Hooks. Most of all, we cannot but concur with D R Nagaraj’s attempt to show a deeper unity via spirituality in the politics of Ambedkar and Gandhi, way beyond their immediate differences.
I do not agree with Ambedkar’s rejection of all spiritual traditions other than Buddhism. My own inclination is like that of Raimon Panikkar, a great proponent of “intra-religious dialogue”, who once said, “I left Europe [for India] as a Christian, I discovered I was a Hindu and returned as a Buddhist, without ever having ceased to be Christian.”
The degeneration of religions has very much to do with the unholy alliance that has emerged historically between institutionalised religion and the structures of power in society. This is truly ironic because the founders of religious traditions were all social revolutionaries. And this has badly obscured the invaluable deeper truth embodied in these traditions.
The dominant values of our time include Ayn Rand’s “virtue of selfishness”, imposition of sameness in both McDonaldised global capitalism and totalitarian states, intensifying hatred for excluded minorities and the strident assertiveness of certainty of knowledge and dominion over nature, which spans both the Left and the Right. The consequences of these are vividly before us — the continual crises afflicting global capitalism, growing inequality and violence within society, as also a planet in serious danger of destruction, underscored most recently by Covid-19.
Working for the annihilation of caste, Ambedkar would have wanted us to affirm the oneness of all existence, in recognition of our interconnectedness, way beyond the separate self. Only on that basis can we live a life animated by the Buddha’s exhortation often cited by Ambedkar: “Just as the earth does not feel hurt and does not resent, so also you Bhikkus must continue to bear Maitri towards your offenders . . . Let the ambit of your Maitri be as boundless as the world”.
And develop necessary upekkha(detachment) without which it would become impossible to have either the stamina to sustain the struggle for change or the wisdom to bring it to a creative fruition.
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The United Nations has shaped so much of global co-operation and regulation that we wouldn’t recognise our world today without the UN’s pervasive role in it. So many small details of our lives – such as postage and copyright laws – are subject to international co-operation nurtured by the UN.
In its 75th year, however, the UN is in a difficult moment as the world faces climate crisis, a global pandemic, great power competition, trade wars, economic depression and a wider breakdown in international co-operation.
Still, the UN has faced tough times before – over many decades during the Cold War, the Security Council was crippled by deep tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The UN is not as sidelined or divided today as it was then. However, as the relationship between China and the US sours, the achievements of global co-operation are being eroded.
The way in which people speak about the UN often implies a level of coherence and bureaucratic independence that the UN rarely possesses. A failure of the UN is normally better understood as a failure of international co-operation.
We see this recently in the UN’s inability to deal with crises from the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, to civil conflict in Syria, and the failure of the Security Council to adopt a COVID-19 resolution calling for ceasefires in conflict zones and a co-operative international response to the pandemic.
The UN administration is not primarily to blame for these failures; rather, the problem is the great powers – in the case of COVID-19, China and the US – refusing to co-operate.
Where states fail to agree, the UN is powerless to act.
Marking the 75th anniversary of the official formation of the UN, when 50 founding nations signed the UN Charter on June 26, 1945, we look at some of its key triumphs and resounding failures.
Five successes
1. Peacekeeping
The United Nations was created with the goal of being a collective security organisation. The UN Charter establishes that the use of force is only lawful either in self-defence or if authorised by the UN Security Council. The Security Council’s five permanent members, being China, US, UK, Russia and France, can veto any such resolution.
The UN’s consistent role in seeking to manage conflict is one of its greatest successes.
A key component of this role is peacekeeping. The UN under its second secretary-general, the Swedish statesman Dag Hammarskjöld – who was posthumously awarded the Nobel Peace prize after he died in a suspicious plane crash – created the concept of peacekeeping. Hammarskjöld was responding to the 1956 Suez Crisis, in which the US opposed the invasion of Egypt by its allies Israel, France and the UK.
UN peacekeeping missions involve the use of impartial and armed UN forces, drawn from member states, to stabilise fragile situations. “The essence of peacekeeping is the use of soldiers as a catalyst for peace rather than as the instruments of war,” said then UN Secretary-General Javier Pérez de Cuéllar, when the forces won the 1988 Nobel Peace Prize following missions in conflict zones in the Middle East, Africa, Asia, Central America and Europe.
However, peacekeeping also counts among the UN’s major failures.
2. Law of the Sea
Negotiated between 1973 and 1982, the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) set up the current international law of the seas. It defines states’ rights and creates concepts such as exclusive economic zones, as well as procedures for the settling of disputes, new arrangements for governing deep sea bed mining, and importantly, new provisions for the protection of marine resources and ocean conservation.
Mostly, countries have abided by the convention. There are various disputes that China has over the East and South China Seas which present a conflict between power and law, in that although UNCLOS creates mechanisms for resolving disputes, a powerful state isn’t necessarily going to submit to those mechanisms.
Secondly, on the conservation front, although UNCLOS is a huge step forward, it has failed to adequately protect oceans that are outside any state’s control. Ocean ecosystems have been dramatically transformed through overfishing. This is an ecological catastrophe that UNCLOS has slowed, but failed to address comprehensively.
3. Decolonisation
The idea of racial equality and of a people’s right to self-determination was discussed in the wake of World War I and rejected. After World War II, however, those principles were endorsed within the UN system, and the Trusteeship Council, which monitored the process of decolonisation, was one of the initial bodies of the UN.
Although many national independence movements only won liberation through bloody conflicts, the UN has overseen a process of decolonisation that has transformed international politics. In 1945, around one third of the world’s population lived under colonial rule. Today, there are less than 2 million people living in colonies.
When it comes to the world’s First Nations, however, the UN generally has done little to address their concerns, aside from the non-binding UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of 2007.
4. Human rights
The Human Rights Declaration of 1948 for the first time set out fundamental human rights to be universally protected, recognising that the “inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world”.
Since 1948, 10 human rights treaties have been adopted – including conventions on the rights of children and migrant workers, and against torture and discrimination based on gender and race – each monitored by its own committee of independent experts.
The language of human rights has created a new framework for thinking about the relationship between the individual, the state and the international system. Although some people would prefer that political movements focus on ‘liberation’ rather than ‘rights’, the idea of human rights has made the individual person a focus of national and international attention.
5. Free trade
Depending on your politics, you might view the World Trade Organisation as a huge success, or a huge failure.
The WTO creates a near-binding system of international trade law with a clear and efficient dispute resolution process.
The majority Australian consensus is that the WTO is a success because it has been good for Australian famers especially, through its winding back of subsidies and tariffs.
However, the WTO enabled an era of globalisation which is now politically controversial.
Recently, the US has sought to disrupt the system. In addition to the trade war with China, the Trump Administration has also refused to appoint tribunal members to the WTO’s Appellate Body, so it has crippled the dispute resolution process. Of course, the Trump Administration is not the first to take issue with China’s trade strategies, which include subsidises for ‘State Owned Enterprises’ and demands that foreign firms transfer intellectual property in exchange for market access.
The existence of the UN has created a forum where nations can discuss new problems, and climate change is one of them. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up in 1988 to assess climate science and provide policymakers with assessments and options. In 1992, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change created a permanent forum for negotiations.
However, despite an international scientific body in the IPCC, and 165 signatory nations to the climate treaty, global greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase.
Under the Paris Agreement, even if every country meets its greenhouse gas emission targets we are still on track for ‘dangerous warming’. Yet, no major country is even on track to meet its targets; while emissions will probably decline this year as a result of COVID-19, atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases will still increase.
This illustrates a core conundrum of the UN in that it opens the possibility of global cooperation, but is unable to constrain states from pursuing their narrowly conceived self-interests. Deep co-operation remains challenging.
Five failures of the UN
1. Peacekeeping
During the Bosnian War, Dutch peacekeeping forces stationed in the town of Srebrenica, declared a ‘safe area’ by the UN in 1993, failed in 1995 to stop the massacre of more than 8000 Muslim men and boys by Bosnian Serb forces. This is one of the most widely discussed examples of the failures of international peacekeeping operations.
On the massacre’s 10th anniversary, then UN Secretary General Kofi Annan wrote that the UN had “made serious errors of judgement, rooted in a philosophy of impartiality”, contributing to a mass murder that would “haunt our history forever”.
If you look at some of the other infamous failures of peacekeeping missions – in places such as Rwanda, Somalia and Angola – it is the limited powers given to peacekeeping operations that have resulted in those failures.
2. The invasion of Iraq
The invasion of Iraq by the US in 2003, which was unlawful and without Security Council authorisation, reflects the fact that the UN is has very limited capacity to constrain the actions of great powers.
The Security Council designers created the veto power so that any of the five permanent members could reject a Council resolution, so in that way it is programmed to fail when a great power really wants to do something that the international community generally condemns.
In the case of the Iraq invasion, the US didn’t veto a resolution, but rather sought authorisation that it did not get. The UN, if you go by the idea of collective security, should have responded by defending Iraq against this unlawful use of force.
The invasion proved a humanitarian disaster with the loss of more than 400,000 lives, and many believe that it led to the emergence of the terrorist Islamic State.
3. Refugee crises
The UN brokered the 1951 Refugee Convention to address the plight of people displaced in Europe due to World War II; years later, the 1967 Protocol removed time and geographical restrictions so that the Convention can now apply universally (although many countries in Asia have refused to sign it, owing in part to its Eurocentric origins).
Despite these treaties, and the work of the UN High Commission for Refugees, there is somewhere between 30 and 40 million refugees, many of them, such as many Palestinians, living for decades outside their homelands. This is in addition to more than 40 million people displaced within their own countries.
While for a long time refugee numbers were reducing, in recent years, particularly driven by the Syrian conflict, there have been increases in the number of people being displaced.
During the COVID-19 crisis, boatloads of Rohingya refugees were turned away by port after port. This tragedy has echoes of pre-World War II when ships of Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi Germany were refused entry by multiple countries.
And as a catastrophe of a different kind looms, there is no international framework in place for responding to people who will be displaced by rising seas and other effects of climate change.
4. Conflicts without end
Across the world, there is a shopping list of unresolved civil conflicts and disputed territories.
Palestine and Kashmir are two of the longest-running failures of the UN to resolve disputed lands. More recent, ongoing conflicts include the civil wars in Syria and Yemen.
The common denominator of unresolved conflicts is either division among the great powers, or a lack of international interest due to the geopolitical stakes not being sufficiently high. For instance, the inaction during the Rwandan civil war in the 1990s was not due to a division among great powers, but rather a lack of political will to engage.
In Syria, by contrast, Russia and the US have opposing interests and back opposing sides: Russia backs the government of the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, whereas the US does not.
5. Acting like it’s 1945
The UN is increasingly out of step with the reality of geopolitics today.
The permanent members of the Security Council reflect the division of power internationally at the end of World War II. The continuing exclusion of Germany, Japan, and rising powers such as India and Indonesia, reflects the failure to reflect the changing balance of power.
Also, bodies such as the IMF and the World Bank, which are part of the UN system, continue to be dominated by the West. In response, China has created potential rival institutions such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.
Western domination of UN institutions undermines their credibility. However, a more fundamental problem is that institutions designed in 1945 are a poor fit with the systemic global challenges – of which climate change is foremost – that we face today.