Many of us watched with incredulity the warmth with which Prime Minister Narendra Modi hugged the long-standing Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu. Today, Israel under the leadership of Netanyahu stands at the metaphorical bar of global justice as the destroyer of Palestine, and the killer of more than 70,000 Palestinians, including 20,000 children. India has not taken a clear stand on the issue of Palestine. Within two days of Modi’s return to India, the United States and Israel launched an attack on Iran, an attack that quickly spilled over into a number of Gulf countries. India issued normal platitudes about de-escalation, dialogue, and safety of civilians, particularly Indians but not a word condemning what is clearly an act of what in the twentieth century was known as imperialism. In Iran, 153 students died in an attack on their school by the combined forces of the US and Israel. India kept quiet. There was a time when India stood at the forefront of the non-aligned movement, particularly in the United Nations General Assembly, for example against the Unilateral Declaration of Independence by Ian Smith, head of the white racist regime in what was then Southern Rhodesia, and apartheid South Africa. When Ghana became independent in March 1957, Jawaharlal Nehru came to the Department of African Studies in Delhi University, set up under his guidance as other area studies departments were, to celebrate Ghana’s independence along with African and other students. He echoed Kwame Nkrumah’s famous words, ‘The independence of Ghana is incomplete without the independence of Africa’.Today our leaders’ turn their faces away from horrific spectacles of imperialism that gobble up thousands of lives. The numbers killed are heartbreaking. So many men and women and children have been killed. For what? A piece of land and for what right-wing populists claim as national honour. That is the nature of space. A philosophical puzzle asks: how many angels can dance on the head of a pin? We know that only one angel can do so, if another angel attempts to join her –we presume angels are women, the first angel will be pushed off. This philosophical puzzle illustrates the nature of time and space. Multiple events occur at a moment in time, but only one agent can inhabit a point of space. We know the nation-state is inextricably connected to space. Therefore, it guards borders with all its might, especially occupier states. But is the killing of thousands of people in the ignoble pursuit of protecting national space consonant with international law? Should we be celebrating such a regime? And what of us who support, what we assume rightly, is the legitimate right of Palestinians to their homeland? We have been left helpless, angry and defenceless. What is to be done? This generates a question. How is it that ruling classes can overturn policies that once made India great? How is it that regimes manage to gather support while doing so? What kind of a story lies behind the phenomenon: support for policies that are clearly wanting? To understand the phenomenon, I returned to the history of ideas and revisited once again Vaclac Havel’s The Power of the Powerless. He wrote this as a dissident in Communist Czechoslovakia in 1978. Havel, author, poet, politician, statesman, the last president of a united Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and the first President of the Czech Republic (1993-2003) opened this essay with the famous words of the Communist Manifesto: ‘A Specter is Haunting East Europe; the specter of what in the West is called dissent’. The specter, he wrote, had not appeared suddenly, it was a natural and inevitable consequence of the present historical phase that it was haunting. It was born at a time when the system was unsustainable because it exercised unadulterated, brutal and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of non-conformity. Within the system, non-conformity can neither be implemented nor accommodated. Also read: Modi’s Silence Over US-Israeli Attack on Iran Is at Odds with Roots of India’s Foreign PolicyThe interesting part of this 80-page-long essay is this: he was not calling for an overthrow of the regime. His objective was to analyse a form of government that did not rely overtly on techniques of terror to discipline populations. Populations, he wrote, are disciplined by repetitive and unknowing obedience to modes of control established by the ruling ideology, and by the uncritical acceptance of palpable untruths. Regimes continue to hold sway over the minds and imaginations of citizens by this internalisation, even though they might recognise even in their sub-conscious, that what is passed off as true is palpably untrue. Small and routine acts of obedience are the main support system of post-totalitarian systems of governments wrote Havel. The argument is more than relevant for our times and the rule of right-wing populist governments. Such governments hesitate to take over power through violence, as highly decorated army generals did in the last century. The consequences of army coups were wonderfully displayed in Costa Gavras’s Z. The costs of such takeovers are too high, and far too visible. The better option is to maintain constitutions and institutions but hollow them out, to defame the opposition, to fill coveted posts with their own supporters, to speak to the people directly as if mediatory institutions are incapable of doing so.To return to Havel, whose famous example of how people obey is of the manager of a fruit and vegetable shop who places in his window, among the onions and the carrots, the slogan ‘Workers of the world unite’. Is he genuinely enthusiastic about this slogan or has he put it there mindlessly because he is expected to do so? Verbally the act can be expressed thus. “I, the greengrocer X Y, live here and I know what I must do. I must behave in the manner expected of me. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to live in peace.”Between the aims of the post-totalitarian system and the aims of life there is a yawning abyss, writes Havel insightfully. While life in its essence moves towards plurality, diversity, independent self-constitution, self-organisation, and towards the fulfilment of its own freedom, the system demands conformity, uniformity and discipline. Life strives to create new structures. The system forces people into most probable states. The system serves people just that much, just so much to ensure that people will serve it. The moment people move beyond pre-determined roles the act is seen as an attack on the system. The system moves to a blind automatism in which people are mere things. When people think they are doing what they believe is true they are ‘living a lie’.The Power of the Powerless does not tell us how governments govern but how people behave.We do not have to challenge power as much as to deprive the rulers of their constituency. People have to be told that trading truth for being left alone in peace, is not a viable exchange though human beings are arguably tempted to act this way. There is much more to the essay but this is the gist of it, and it is precisely this part that is relevant for us.There was a time when the international community upheld ideals – universal rights, cosmopolitanism and justice. Today we speak of power, weapons and strategic intimidation. This was the case when Havel penned his magisterial essay. The Power of the Powerless is not a manifesto for activism, it is an ethical document asking people to hold fast onto the truth, and to live in truth not in a lie.Truth enables us to recognise the difference between right and wrong, between what is and what should be. He called for a regeneration of the public sphere, of a public consensus, and of the making of a moral consciousness. It is only when the public sphere of diverse opinions and voices comes together, that we can counteract a government whose power lies in its ability to sell untruths, to impose them on moral imagination, to tarnish minds, to corrupt Indians, who we once thought would trump the world with their commitment to truth and non-violence, and who once believed that the majesty of our great civilisation lay in non-violence, truth, and tolerance. Today untruths smear the face of our plural history, of diversity, and of our leader’s willingness to embrace the head of a government that calls the citizens of another country ‘animals’. Today our leaders’ have become power brokers; far removed from the much-desired headgear of Vishwaguru. Ironically, at the time the myth makers were staking this claim, the crown of Vishwaguru came to decorate the head of South Africa when it took Israel to the International Criminal Court. Note that this is our country and our people. We merrily embrace myth making. It is time we stop believing in things that are palpably untrue, otherwise our fate will be that of Galgotias University at the AI meet, it was laughed out of court.Neera Chandhoke is a former professor of Political Science, University of Delhi.