‘Autocrats’ by Rajiv Dogra: The nature of absolute political power

Rajiv Dogra, who was an accomplished professional diplomat, has after his retirement become a successful author focusing on India-Pakistan relations, among other subjects. His latest offering — ‘Autocrats: Charisma, Power, and Their Lives’ — is essentially an essay on the nature of absolute political power through the ages. He has examined it through its impact on those who wield it and on those on whom they impose their will, usually violently.

Dogra goes into detail on the social, psychological, economic and political aspects of the personality of autocrats. He emphasises their self-obsessions and narcissism and almost total disregard for human life and welfare, despite the veneer of altruism that they may seek to project.

Going beyond them, he also looks into the reasons why societies and polities have tolerated such atrocious violators of their rights from the beginning of the formation of states till the present. His work is based on deep study and contains interesting and valuable insights. In addition, his narrative flows smoothly, making the book a good read.

Anecdotes and the observations of philosophers and others have added flavour to his work.

The problem with it, perhaps inherent in a work of this vast scope, lies in the generalisations that Dogra relies on time and again. Thus, he often covers autocrats and their societies and ideologies with the same brush. Consider this — to the question on “…how do dictators survive in power”, he responds: “The general impression is through threats and brute force. Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol Pot, the Taliban and many others relied on mass terror.” He mentions others too. The problem is that vast sections of the people believed in communism, Nazism and, in Afghanistan, in the Sharia and conservative Pashtun traditions. Thus, vast sections of the Soviets, Germans and Afghans endorsed as valid the violent and autocratic methods of imposing the ‘faith’, whether secular or theological. Hence, generalisations never sufficiently answer questions.

All through the book, Dogra laments the ills imposed on humanity by autocrats, from Genghis Khan to Timur to the Roman emperors to the 20th century dictators, who were guilty of mass murder. His tone is idealistic, if not moralistic, and this is illustrated at the end of the work when he hopes that a dawn will come when humanity is truly free. Will such a day really come?

In the midst of all this, Dogra, while arguing that autocracy and tyranny are deleterious for the “economy or societal issues”, states that it is so for art and science too. And, in this context, he writes: “The glory that India once was in the intellectual world gradually became a distant memory because of a thousand years of foreign occupation, and resulting authoritarian rule.” He seeks to illustrate this with a few examples. There are two problems with this proposition.

The first is that he has not examined, at all, the nature of rulers in ancient India. Is it his case that none were authoritarian? The second is that he has overlooked the achievements in poetry, music and architecture, to name just three, during the ‘thousand years’.

It is undeniable and condemnable that temples and glorious examples of sculpture were destroyed. But this cannot lead to the conclusion that the entire medieval period was one of darkness. After all, it was during this period that Tulsidas composed the ‘Ramcharitmanas’, one of the greatest texts of all times. And earlier, there was the poetry of Amir Khusrau, which lives in the hearts of the people still.

Perhaps, Dogra, like all writers, cannot filter out his dogmas from his books.

— The writer is a former diplomat