The partition of India in 1947 would bring peace and security to the region; economic development would promote social cohesive-ness. Such were some of the assumptions or expectations on the eve of political freedom from the colonial rule. More than half a century later achievements on those areas leave much to be de-sired.
The recent rise of theocratic fundamentalism has heightened the feeling of insecurity. Sectarian divisions within the society have become more pronounced. All this has happened to both the major communities of South Asia. Separatist movements abound in all three countries of the region. What could be more compeIling a field for study?
In the remote past the social order used to be dictated by a few, wielding force and theology in varying proportion. Today's world reckons every individual's equal moral worth. Here is the primary site where the two the past and the present are colliding. It is not so much a clash of civilisations as a collision between the classical and the modern ways of organizing our social existence.
This conflict is visible everywhere in the world; but it is so acute in South Asia mainly because the theocratic contours crisscross the political, while holding the economy to ransom.
For some time I have been wandering around this theme. Recently at the invitation of a university I gave two lectures on globalisation. I collected my thoughts keeping South Asia at the center of attention. This book is an extended version of the mate-rials that I had assembled for that occasion. It offers a Common Minimum Agenda (CMA) that is necessary in the long run for genuine social stability and economic development.
South Asia here means three countries, namely, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. More than one-fifth of the world's population live there. These countries are home to the second, third and fourth largest Muslim populations in the world, Indonesia having claimed the first. Pakistan and Bangladesh are Islamic republics, India is a secular democracy. The Hindus and Muslims of the world constitute some one-third of the total population. These two communities are among the poorest in the world. Kuran (1997) and Weber (1958) feel that the rigidity of social structure stands in the way of their economic development. On top of it, theocratic fundamentalism has recently intensified its activities among them. So the question of social reform has become urgent. But how does a society choose its own arrangement?
Modalities of Social Choice: The issue of social choice received its first formal representation in terms of voting at the hands of French mathematicians such as J. C. Borda and Marquis de Condorcet in the late eighteenth century about the time of the French Revolution. After a good deal of investigation this discipline has reached a fairly definitive stage. As it stands now, social morality requires that every individual's assessment of all the feasible states of society be taken into account in working out the social order. We shall utilize this basic principle to attain social stability in South Asia. We shall also be mindful of the dynamics of choice. That is to say, the decision of choice need not be taken all at once; the process may be made sequential, gathering information on the way, and possibly changing peoples' awareness in tandem.
Human beings are engaged in two basic activities reproduction of species and procurement of subsistence, carried on at two sites, namely, family and factory. Families get together to form a society, and factories to constitute an economy, while to run them all a polity springs up. These three sectors operate under different laws, at varying speed. Polity is agile, flexible and fast to adapt, economy is relatively slow, and society is the slowest. The three move together as a result of tensions between social piety, eco-nomic wealth and political power.
Religions aim at placing the society on a pedestal of morality. and in so doing they make a choice of social arrangement on theological and philosophical ground, to be enforced by a discipline of, say, the Last Day, the Day of Judgment or the eternal cycle of life. This is the classical modality of social choice. The history of social choice is thus at least five thousand years old. Human beings exist in three dimensions social, economic and political, each with its own distinct morality. Driving a company out of business through market competition, for example, is commonplace in economics, but it is not comparable to a case of culpable homicide in society. Trouncing a political party in poll or even ousting it from power by coup d'etat or violent revolution is not exactly considered politically incorrect or unacceptable to the comity of nations Morality, understood as a code of conduct, is thus broadly of three types social, economic and political.
There is a branch of knowledge known as hermeneutics, the study of general principles of interpreting scriptures. For both the Jews and the Christians throughout their histories, the primary purpose of hermeneutics, and of the exegetical methods employed in interpretation, has been to discover the truths and values of the Bible. Hermeneutics per se, however, is a general method of ac-quiring knowledge that can be applied to understand scriptures of any religion. Let us suggest the following hermeneutic principles. First, a scripture as a whole or in its parts has a two-fold message one is historical or particular, and the other is general or universal. The former has come to light in response to some concrete and specific historical situation, and it offers a resolution appropriate for that very conjuncture. By contrast, the latter does not exhaust itself at a given moment of history, it is deeply embedded in a moral kernel of far wider resonance for almost all times to come.
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