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Most people imagine that journalists take a huge delight in tearing down,
destroying, taunting and thumbing their noses. In television pies apparently we
love to see the Berlin Wall being pulled down. Well that's all wrong. To describe
the disfigurement of the political system, the shameless dishonesty of the people
who run it, to see the serialwise downfall of our institutions in-education, law,
medicine, and the elementary public services, to encounter how easily men are
willing to trade away the lives of their fellow men by building unsafe bridges,
leaving live electric cables exposed, producing fake drugs, attacking helpless men
and women in trains, calling strikes callously in hospitals and essential services
is distasteful, so much so that it is hard to suppress a terribly treasonable
thought-the British with a few thousand soldiers and much fewer civil servants
(quite a few of them Indian) did a better job of running this country even though
they took so much from it. We journalists don't jubilate at the mess and cruelty
but we are sorry to our depths.
As youngsters in middle class ,families we knew by heart the names of
Vice-Chancellors of all Indian universities and of the Chief Justices and puisne
judges in all the High Courts of India that was the respect that our elders had
drilled into us about education and the law. Also by heart we knew the names of
every President of Indian National Congress and the session over which he or she
presided. Today who remembers and who cares? Kakinada, Gaya? who were the
Presidents?
How very few who remember like me standing outside the Town Hall in Calcutta (it
was too full to get into) and hear Sarojini Naidu preside over the memorial
meeting for which Sir Tej Bahadur Sapru had come to preside. There were some
rowdy murmurs from corners of the hall and Mrs Naidu said in her thunderously
threatening voice. "I have presided over many stormy meetings in Bengal and I have
quelled many stormy meetings. "How we all laughed and let her have her way.
Later when we stood at the corner of the little lane off Ballygunge Circular Road
where Maulana Abul Kalam Azad used to live and watched the Working Committee
leaders driving in (they didn't come for lunches and dinners then) we still failed
to understand how the Congress in Bengal, Punjab and elsewhere failed to come to
an understanding with the Muslims who were in many cases our school chums and
soulmates.
And we have never been able to understand how, over the Eve body of Mahatma
Gandhi, the biggywiggies of the Congress went back on everything they stood for
and went in for Partition. Why, Why? It was only fifty years ago but the history
has not been written, the secret guarding of the private and official papers
prevents that sordid story emerging-the story that India with Muslims, Hindus,
Christians, Sikhs, Parsis and others could have been a puissant nation and not
left Pakistan the 158th poorest nation in the world. We are hiding and maybe
falsifying history. We are today watching a moth-eaten tragedy in three acts,
three countries envious of each other yet able to do little better than express
their envy and malice and the expression comes from the so-called elite-the army,
civil servants and the political glitterati. What if Nehru, Patel, Azad, Rajendra
Prasad and others had a little more backbone and just a little more patience then
the British could not have imposed on India the partition they did, when they did,
but they did it with the consent of the Indian political leaders, Hindus and
Muslims.
Kamaladevi Chattopadbyaya says in her oral memoirs that Nehru, Patel and company
were afraid that they were getting old and would never be able to exercise power.
She was right. Nehru with his frequent visits to Europe couldn't see that war
was coming. Subhas Bose, living in Vienna and travelling in Central Europe knew it
was imminent and prepared an Indian policy for it. And so the Indian Congress had
no policy towards the British, towards the Muslims, towards the North-East, the
poorer castes, towards women who were 50 per cent of the population and towards
the coining crises in South and South East Asia. Congress's economic policy
proved a disaster. And afterward no real policy about the division of the states,
the needs, about general and technical education.
Next week I hope to be in Pakistan, not sponsored by anybody, sick of our politics
and theirs, but to grope and feel if Pakistan too has been betrayed by small
people with unbounded ambition but little vision.
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