SPECIAL ARTICLE

Yogi vs Commissar
The Dilemma Of A Dictator

By Amulya Ganguli

THE Chinese President Hu Jintao might have thought that he was making a telling point when he told the visiting Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd that unity of the motherland was of paramount interest in the “internal matter” concerning Tibet. As such, he refused to attach any importance to the issues of ethnicity, religion and human rights which might be involved. Yet, anyone outside a one-party state would have understood the value of these three points. Hu’s contempt for them is rooted, however, in communist history, where civil liberties have always been regarded with suspicion.
Ever since the time when the communists were waging their battle against Czardom, they have refused to give free play to the concept of dissent, which is an integral part of civil rights, lest it should dilute their “struggle” when in opposition, and undermine “proletarian solidarity” when in power. Disagreement was also seen as a bourgeois trick to mislead the people into parliamentary “cretinism”, as Engels said.
It is another matter that the suppression of opposing voices outside led to the stifling of dissent inside the party, paving the way for Stalinism and, ultimately, the demise of the creed. Even then, the trashing of human rights has remained a basic feature of communist (and fascist) rule.
Yet, the rest of the world has moved so far away from the rise of totalitarianism in the early 20th century that civil liberties have become the lodestone by which a regime is judged. This is where the Chinese have faltered, for they cannot grasp how the esoteric ideas of freedom and human rights can wash away their “achievements” in ending serfdom in Tibet and ushering in modern development. In a way, their attitude reflects the standard argument of all imperialists, echoed by historians like Niall Ferguson, that colonizing a country frees it from the bondage of the past.
There has apparently been a vague realization of late in Beijing that human rights are important after all. Hence, the observation of the director of the China Society for Human Rights Studies that “ China has made remarkable achievements in economic construction and great progress in human rights construction”. But the very infelicity of the phrase is an indication that “human rights construction” in China may not be the same as plain and simple human rights in democracies. It may not be beside the point to recall in this contest that the Soviet Union ’s constitution was regarded in its time by the commissars as the most democratic of all.
The Chinese, of course, will not accept that Tibet is their colony. However, ethnicity comes in the way of their claim that the Roof of the World is a part of their “motherland”, a curious choice of word since the communists (and fascists) are supposed to believe in fatherlands. The scene, therefore, is similar to conditions in South Africa under apartheid, where Afrikaners of Dutch origin regarded that portion of the Dark Continent as their motherland. Their brutal treatment of the natives in that period also resembles the behaviour of the Han Chinese from the mainland in Tibet . But like Nelson Mandela, the Dalai Lama, too, has based his movement on asserting the rights of individuals to manage their own affairs under a system of autonomy which, in essence, implies the granting of democratic rights.
What we are witnessing is a replay of the age-old conflict between authoritarianism and freedom. And, as has been seen before, it is the moral strength of the latter which ultimately proves to be stronger than the military might of the repressive state.
It is possible that the Chinese are conscious of such a denouement in which the yogi prevails over the commissar. Otherwise, it is not easy to explain why Beijing should have described the battle against unarmed monks as a life-and-death struggle or descend to vulgar abuse in its description of the Dalai Lama as “a wolf in monk’s robes, a devil with a human face but the heart of a beast”.
True, as the Cultural Revolution showed, sobriety and decency were not a part of the Chinese way of dealing with opponents who, in that time of upheaval, were Mao Zedong’s adversaries like Liu Shaochi and Lin Biao. The crudeness of expression and of conduct, as seen in the behaviour of the “thugs” who accompanied the Olympic torch, and in the summoning of the Indian ambassador at 2 a.m., have been very much in evidence in this outbreak of probably the first genuine crisis which Beijing has faced in recent years. But its intemperance can also be explained by its suspicion that the world has seen its feet of clay. The Chinese know that they are in a dilemma. A Tiananmen Square-type crackdown may restore “peace”, but, apart from irreparably disrupting the Olympics, it will also make it extremely difficult to continue to assert Beijing ’s “sovereignty” over Tibet .
China is also probably suffering from a sense of inferiority complex vis-à-vis  India . While India stands out as a beacon of democracy in its part of the world, with its respect for ethnicity, religion and human rights ensuring the unity of a pluralist motherland, China is turning out to be “a devil with … the heart of a beast”. What is more, China ’s all-weather friend, Pakistan , which it used to needle India , has realized the folly of continuous enmity.
Besides, the nuclear deal promises to take India into the big league which the machinations of China ’s admirers among Indian communists may not be able to prevent. The international community, too, has realized that for all its dazzling economic progress, China 's totalitarianism makes it vulnerable to internal turmoil.
Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union because of the appearance of a political reformer like Gorbachov within the party. China presumed that it had avoided that fate with the help of an economic, but not political, reformer, Deng Xiaoping. The Olympics were to highlight the arrival of the commissar on the world stage with his open economy and closed society. But the yogi with faith in the rightness of his cause has made all the best-laid plans go haywire.
The writer is a former Assistant Editor, The Statesman