Republic Day Thoughts

I can understand that India celebrates “Republic Day” — the day on which the Indian constitution came into force in 1950. I am not a huge big fan of the Indian constitution, as you may probably know. But what really bothers me is the ridiculous parade that they put up all over the country, the main sad event being in the capital New Delhi. That grown-ups would participate in something like this puzzles me at times, and then I remind myself that this is consistent with the general stupidity that blankets this place anyway. This ultimate dog and pony show’s absurdity is matched by the hysterical jingoism of the day.

This fact I have mentioned several times: I have asked over 10,000 people and no one has admitted to having read the Indian constitution in its entirety. They have pious beliefs about its goodness but they have never bothered to read it. I am certain that none of the lawmakers — a strange word to use for those who are generally more corrupt than the average person on the street — of India have read it either. But when it comes to celebrating the adoption of the constitution, there’s enthusiastic participation.

In the bygone pre-TV age, street performers in small towns across India used to put up little circuses to entertain the crowds. These would include acts like five people on a bicycle or tight-rope walking on a rope strung five feet above the ground. I was reminded of that when I caught a glimpse of a dozen people riding one motorbike at the Republic Day parade. This spectacle struggled to rise above the street performers’ level but failed. That this should go on in a parade to celebrate an important anniversary in full view of the world in a nation that wants to be taken seriously is depressing.

Anyway, even this is not why I find the whole parade thing sad and pathetic. It is the display of military hardware. As a rational human being, I am against violence in general. What really makes me see red is organized, large-scale violence which consumes trillions of dollars and millions of lives. It is called “defense” or “national defense.” What is the most remarkable about this global phenomenon of “defense” is that it is entirely one-sided: there is not a single participant in the entire world that is even remotely interested in “offense.” Everyone is persistently, absolutely, perpetually, sincerely for peace and only doing what it needs to do for “defense.”

Take India and its neighbors. Pakistan? It has to defend itself against India. Pakistan, itself, is born pure and has no evil intentions. Its leaders will attest to that under oath. India? It needs defense against Pakistan, Bangladesh, China. China, of course, is only doing what it needs to do to defend itself from India and others. The same story can be told about each of the 200+ countries, all armed to the extent that they can afford or the US needs to sell weapons to.

From my perspective as a free-market laissez faire economist, a limited government is a necessary evil and big government is pure evil. The greatest evil that government does is not that it hinders the creation of economic wealth and limits human freedom; the greatest evil is that it actively destroys economic wealth and kills by the millions directly or indirectly through organized, large-scale violence usually called wars.

Perhaps I have only met a limited sample of people across the world but I have not yet met even one person who harbors any intentions of spending their own resources to kill or even merely harm random strangers. Maybe there are psychotic people who would like to kill others for no reason but they must be a vanishingly small percentage of the global population, and the average person on the street would rather live and let live instead. Yet each nation spends unreasonable amounts on funding huge organizations whose sole purpose is to kill as many and as efficiently as possible. These are called the “defense establishments.”

The great unspeakable and unspoken evil in the world is the military establishment. These militaries would not and could not exist without the support of governments. No corporation or NGO has the power to fund what national governments routinely do for maintaining their respective war machines.

These war machines represent the end product of the worst kind of mass delusion.

There was jubilation among Indians when India became a “nuclear armed” nation. Indians were celebrating their ability to kill humans wholesale efficiently. Pakistanis did the same when it was their turn. Apparently the alternative did not occur to them. The destructive power of popular delusions is most clearly evidenced by the jingoistic celebrations of weapons of mass destruction by the masses who are its primary targets.

I feel pity for the deluded masses but I reserve my anger for the active participants in the war machinery — the arms manufacturers, the arms dealers, the generals and most of all the politicians who whip up the mass jingoistic fervor that fuels the global war of all against all.

Well, other than that, I think that there’s nothing wrong with a stupid parade with idiotic floats even if it is attended by the VVIP, the VIP and the unwashed ignorant masses.

{Related post: “Dollar Auctions and Deadly Games.”}

Author: Atanu Dey

Economist. View all posts by Atanu Dey