We, in India, are no strangers to either moral or ethical innovation or to the power of symbolic acts. Little over a hundred years ago, in the Empire Theatre of Johannesburg, a man rose to take a pledge. It was a vow taken in the name of God and with God as witness. This we recognise as the birth of satyagraha. It was the affirmation of the moral in the political realm. It was an affirmation that freedom was not only a political category, it was both moral and spiritual as well. It is, in fact, superior moral virtue. It was the morality of the idea of freedom that the Indian movement of independence sought to actualise. The same man showed us the power of symbolic acts when he along with a chosen band of followers walked to the coastal town of Dandi and by picking up a pinch of salt broke the power of an empire.

The plight of the Indian polity and public life comes in large measure from our inability to acknowledge that the realpolitik does not constitute the whole of the political realm. It stems from a misconception that the polity is superior to and larger than the public sphere. It was the public sphere, an amalgamation of happy polyphonies at that, which defined the political during the freedom movement. We have now relegated the public sphere to a space occupied by cantankerous NGOs and odd-ball dissenters. It is marginal to both our politics and our ethical imagination. We have created a gulf between the ethical imaginations and the imperatives of realpolitik. This does not allow us to understand that a tribal who cuts forest trees as a form of protest is not being destructive but is making a plea to be included in the nation’s memory by dismembering himself. Such distance permits amnesia, deepest of which is about the possibilities of the politics of the moral. This has blunted our innovativeness in the moral and the ethical spheres.

... contd.