In early 1952 Prime Minister Churchill succeeded in persuading few cabinet ministers to agree to a French retreat from South East Asia, even in the event that such a withdrawal would be accompanied by a détente rearguard action, given the inconclusive debate over commitments and spending east of Suez. But negotiations on the French war became acceptable to HMG by the turn of 1953 amidst the growing atmosphere of general East-West détente. It has been suggested that Foreign Secretary Eden approached the four-power Berlin Conference of January–February 1954 with principally the German question rather than China or, especially, Indo-China in mind.

When the Conservatives returned to power in late October 1951 they inherited from their Labour predecessors the overseas policy issues including Indian independence and membership of the British Commonwealth, a large-scale ‘Emergency’ military commitment to cope with the Communist rebellion in Malaya, diplomatic recognition of the PRC and the ASV as well as the direct participation in the Korean War. This chapter approaches the question how the Labour support for the French colonial rearguard action in Indo-China in particular and other Far Eastern commitments in general presented themselves to the post-war Churchill administration.

Applying Ethics

Morality, our sense of the morally right or wrong act, finds expression in individual claims of what is of moral value, for example, honesty, loyalty, fidelity, and what ought to be done or avoided in general and on particular occasions, e.g., always help others in need, never cause unnecessary harm to others, be fair in your dealings with others, etc. More often than not, one may not know why, what is morally right or wrong, is so, except for the very general reason that the morally right action is beneficial for all and the morally wrong act is not. A moral/ethical theory purports to answer the basic question – why are certain acts morally right and certain other acts morally wrong? Of course, one can make moral claims and more generally possess a morality without having a moral theory. Furthermore, the same moral claims may be compatible with different moral theories. Thus, one may hold that lying is wrong without having a systematic account of what makes it wrong and this moral claim may be justifiable by quite distinct moral theories such as those of Consequentialism, Deontology or Divine Law. The level at which moral claims and judgements are made is the level of substantive ethics, and the level at which theories are adduced to explain these claims is the level of normative ethics. There is a third level, that of meta-ethics, which constitutes a discerning enquiry into the fundamental logic of the language of morals.

Museums as temples tend to celebrate successes while those conceived as forums can give equal time to the failures. Ironically, there may be as much or even more to learn from the failures than from the successes. Indeed, the cruelest lesson from history is that no one ever seems to learn from it. Evolutionary dead-ends are rich reservoirs to escalate Benjamin Bloom's pyramid of learning (Fig. I.1) and evaluate the existing syntheses, applications, and understandings of bioprospecting, intellectual property, and the public domain.

Evolutionary dead-ends. I must admit I like it. So you're a professor of anthropology. Correct me if I'm wrong. Wasn't the Neanderthal man an evolutionary dead-end? I read that in the Tuesday edition of The New York Times a few years back. Apparently, geneticists figured out that modern man never interbred with the Neanderthals – how they figured that out, don't ask me, that part I don't remember. May be there just wasn't any chemistry among those proto-humans (The interloper from the previous chapters laughs as he gently grazes his forearms with his outstretched hand as if experiencing goose bumps. He is in a particularly garrulous mood.) But you know what? I'm not so sure that those geneticists are right! I think some of those Neanderthal genes are lurking in my former boss, if that back stabbing son of a bitch is still alive.

Most justifications of violence begin with some reference to the principle of self-defence. Suffering of innocents or wrong done to them is also a reason why arms against the wrong doer should be used. Once we cross over the reasons of personal squabbles and ask why nations wage war, not only the magnitude but also the quality of arguments vary. Certain paradigmatic justifications like, ‘for the sake of prevention of greater calamity’, or ‘for the sake of restoration of good over evil’ buttresses the argument of ethics in war.

The just war theory faces its biggest challenge from the doctrine of moral pacifism. A pacifist condemns all forms of violence. A warmonger holds forth by arguing that status quo through conflict amelioration is an impotent effort towards conflict resolution. In the context of this debate I have placed the issue of ‘dharmayuddha’. Out of several interpolations of meanings, I have found Gandhi's way of resolving conflict through non-violent means contains the debate between pacifists and just war theorists. However, such was not the case with other interpretations of this term.

As I sketch the history of the concept dharmayuddha, from the days of epic, I come across several reasons why retributive justice has demanded actual and mythical wars in the Indian context. In the Mahābhārata a paradigmatic argument is given to justify a family feud over inheritance right to the throne and it is backed by Krishna's arguments from dharma.

1. (a) In case of French irresolution, can American or other intervention be arranged in a manner which will save all or part of Viet Nam without too grave consequences elsewhere?

2. (b) In case of Bao Dai failing to give the leadership urgently required, is there an alternative political solution in Viet Nam which would prevent a Vietminh political victory?

3. (c) In case of Tongkin being lost to the Vietminh, is it feasible and sound to attempt to divide Viet Nam and set up an independent State in the centre and south?

4. (d) If all Viet Nam is lost, can we do anything effective to secure Laos and Cambodia against Vietminh military or political domination?

5. (e) What can we do to strengthen further Siamese resistance to Vietminh and Communist influences?

–Malcolm MacDonald, Commissioner General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, Singapore, 12 March 1954.

The interaction between British attitudes towards decolonized Indo-China and commitments east of Suez became an important policy-making issue in the early 1950s. The origins and character of the axiomatic assumption of Indo- China as an outpost of British regional interests have been approached in the preceding chapters as regards geopolitics, including its cultural dimension, the policy-making process as well as power by proxy.

Where do we seek answers to all the questions that life raises? Can works of art provide answers? If so, does art have absolute authority over life and is life subordinated to art? Or is art a mere reflection of life? Mikhail Bakhtin (1990) observes that art is far too grand and “audaciously self-confident” and “high flown,” and the “humble prose of life” is no match for mighty art, and yet, within the individual they must converge, confront, and exchange ideas and achieve the “unity of answerability.” Art simply cannot provide the inspiration and ignore the prosaic of life, and life in turn cannot remain ineffectual by not answering itself with what has been “experienced and understood in art.” Without the answerability factor, both art and life become impoverished. Bakhtin further points out, “It is not only mutual answerability that art and life must assume, but also mutual liability for blame” (1990, 1). This complex equation between art and life seems to aptly capture the intense relationship that readers develop with the grand epic from India – The Mahabharata.

This epic is unarguably one of the mightiest literary creations in human history, and certainly the longest – seven times the size of Iliad and Odyssey combined.

Individuals, in their remembrance of things past, select segments from their lives, amplify a few events, narrate a few in a matter of fact manner, downplay some despite constant prodding and make up their life stories in the presence of the other. In the very act of textualization the self's relationship to lived experiences shifts and in this process individuals compose unique plots in their life stories and draw distinct characterological profile of themselves. As a researcher, I played an active role in generating narratives by way of framing questions and mediating the narrative flow. Furthermore, I selectively deploy analytical categories to interpret these narratives creating an intersection or perhaps a dialogization of autobiography (the account of person's life) and biography (the retelling of such an account by the other). Bakhtin (1990) argues that there is “no clear-cut, essentially necessary dividing line between autobiography and biography” (p. 150). Bakhtin does acknowledge that there is a difference and it might even be considerable, but in both biography and autobiography the I-for-myself is not the only organizing principle. Instead the image of the person is achieved in a triadic relationship between I-for-myself, I-for-others and others-for-me.

The excursion into the past to recall the epic heroine raises a whole range of questions about memory, representation, retrieval and about the patriarchal structure within which these mental activities take place. The questions are about her very existence in the memory storehouse, and if she does exist, then the questions are about her “location” and about the nature of representation in the individual and collective memory. In the interviews that I conducted, I found a sharp contrast between the recollections of other characters in the Mahabharata and the recollections of its heroine Draupadi. A significant 67 percent of the subjects said that they either had no thoughts on Draupadi, or they didn't care about her or even disliked her or simply reported the events in which she was the central figure (See Appendix I, Table 5).

The questions that came to my mind were varied; has Draupadi disappeared from the memory storehouse, or was she never encoded in the memory to begin with, or is she disseminated, or is it a problem of retrieval, because recalling her would mean confronting some ugly gender questions and waging the gender battle, or is the memory in the Freudian sense repressed; the ego simply cannot handle the anxiety she produces.

This verse taken from Isa Upanishad discusses the paradoxical nature of reality: it is transcendent and immanent; it has both the centrifugal and centripetal forces that determine the underlying unity and diversity of the world. The motion of the world works over the firm grip of perpetual stability. Unity of elements is the eternal truth of things, and diversity is its colorful play. The play is neither light nor trivial, but it becomes light and trivial when divorced from its fundamental unity. This stanza “speaks” much about the Mahabharata (the known) and the Self (the knower) and the essential unity between them and the necessity of diverse play in their partnership. The Mahabharata is so far – it is the timeless past, the ancient past – and yet it is so near, and like a mirror, reflects everything that is immediate and close. It is the “grand story of India” (Maha means great and Bharata is the Sanskrit name for India), and yet can talk to various tales from different lands – those faraway tales and the current emerging ones. It is about a set of cousins feuding over a piece of land, and often likened to the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine.

These musings of Tagore (1971) force me to ponder the irony of my own research enterprise. I wonder how many of my subjects chuckled when I asked them, “What sense do you make of the Mahabharata?” when they might in fact be “singing” these songs through their lives. Perhaps they did “sit there smiling,” and they have every right to do that. But then, I have the right to ask them about the song; perhaps “telling” me about the song may reveal the depths of the song and mutually benefit both of us. It could enhance my understanding of their song and the song itself. It also gives an “outsider's perspective” – an externalization of private meanings – as Vygotsky (1987) points out: “thinking and speech are key to understanding the nature of human consciousness” (p. 285). Private meanings and spontaneous forms of knowledge, Vygotsky argues, are enriched by public expressions and formalizations. The movement is back and forth. Bakhtin writes with some elegance on the significance of outsider's perspective: