HVK Archives: Question Time
Question Time - After Noon
M J Akbar
()
20 August 1996
Title : Question time
Author : M J Akbar
Publication : After Noon
Date : August 20, 1996
It is not easy to celebrate one's fiftieth birthday, as
Bill Clinton is discovering. We all know what he would
like to do: emulate his hero Jack Kennedy and get a 1996
version of Marilyn Monroe to make his day, or night. We
all know what he is going to do: listen to Hillary
Clinton, and settle for Tony Bennett in front of an
audience paying between $10,000 (seat plus dinner at the
Waldorf Astoria plus a photograph with a man who just may
not be President at 51). Though, but that's the way it is
you marry equal-rights Hillary instead of enjoy-yourself
Jacqueline.
How do we organise a party for India's fiftieth birthday?
Asking Lata Mangeshkar to sing Ai mere watan ke logo,
zara aankh mein bhar lo paani would be nice but just a
shade predictable. But while, we wait for the billowing
committee which will eventually tell Prime Minister Deve
Gowda how precisely to celebrate our fiftieth birthday in
our fifty-first year, this columnist has, in the true
spirit of an unilateral declaration of independence,
decided to celebrate India's fiftieth birthday with a
series of silly, even irresponsible, questions. All those
who have over the years, taken say in Delhi, kindly
forgive.
Question Number 1: Why cannot P V Narasimha Rao win an
election by calling Pakistan names?
Sagging fortunes
Since all readers have extremely long memories, they will
doubtless recall that the last ploy used by the former
prime minister, Mr. P V Narasimha Rao, to bolster his
sagging fortunes was to tell Pakistan to behave or else.
He was shown on Congress hoardings smiling next to
missiles. This was the sort of thing Mrs. Indira Gandhi
thrived on; her imperious nose was always sniffing a
threat from across the border, always to much public
applause which, through familiar alchemy, ended up in
votes. Why did Mr. Rao get nothing from the same line?
In state after state he lost to parties which did not
mention Pakistan even once. It never occurred to Chandra
Babu Naidu in Andhra Pradesh, Deve Gowda in Karnataka,
Jyoti Basu in Bengal, Karunanidhi in Tamil Nadu or Laloo
Yadav in Bihar to discuss Pakistan in their election
campaigns and each one of them drubbed the Congress. If
the BJP or the Shiv Sena demolished the Congress
elsewhere it was not because the voters hated Pakistan
but because they hated the Congress.
Question Number 2: Why has the religion of those
streaming into India from Bangladesh changed?
>From that awful moment of partition to the end of
Sixties, the story of Bengal was heavily coloured by a
stream of blood flowing from Calcutta to Dhaka and back:
Hindus coming to India and Muslims leaving for Pakistan
carrying nothing with them but the memory of death and
the hope of life. Then in 1971 three million refugees
entered India - most of them Muslims, fleeing other
Muslims from the land created in the name of Islam. That
was corrected by the emergence of Bangladesh. Then
through the Eighties and into the Nineties, something
awesomely strange began to happen. There ware still
about 10 million Hindus in Bangladesh, but they are not
the ones streaming into India anymore. On the other
hand, Bangladeshi Muslims have been slipping across in
large numbers, turning the whole refugee syndrome on its
head. In fact they are not refugees at all, for no one
is persecuting Muslims in Bangladesh. The refugee is
gone: the migrant has arrived. But it is not as simple
as just that: Muslims are leaving a Muslim country
created specifically to ensure their security in order to
live in a Hindu country. How is such a curious thing
happening?
Question Number 3: Why did it take the BJP 50 years to
come to power, and that too briefly?
Magnetic field
Given the fact that Partition was the seminal event of
modern history, its emotional shadow should have fallen
across the country's politics. But whereas the Muslim
party became the natural inheritor of power in Muslim-
majority Pakistan, the Hindu-majority India. Despite all
its enormous recent gains, the BJP continue to remain
uncertain about the value of Hindutva and the appeal of a
philosophy that offers exclusion as its raison d'etre.
For the fortnight that the BJP was in power it sounded
like the Congress: contrast this to the other thought,
that the decline of the Congress can be traced to its
temptation to sound like the BJP. But for the foundation
stone at Ayodhya in 1989 Rajiv Gandhi would have remained
prime minister; but for the demolition of the Babri
mosque in 1992 P V Narsimha Rao would have remained prime
minister. Indeed but for Ayodhya Atal Behari Vajpayee
would have remained prime minister, and in that paradox
lies the reality of India. That magnetic field called
Ayodhya disturbed the centre of gravity of Congress
politics because it demanded ideological commitment in an
age of compromise. The Congress will not stop lurching
until it returns to that core of stability that comes
from commitment.
Question Number 4: One of the weakest governments in five
decades delivered one of the strongest messages that
India has ever sent to the world when, alone, India
vetoed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty which the
nuclear powers were imposing on the rest of the world.
Power was being formally institutionalised in the hands
of a cartel of nations whose chief claim to continued
domination of this planet is that they had won the second
world war. The United States of America, the United
Kingdom, Russia, France, China. The colonised nations
had nothing to do with that war except as providers of
human and natural resources, but they were expected to
write away their future to the victors of the past. Such
has been the domination of these five powers,
particularly after the integration of their old enemies,
Germany and Japan, and defeat of their new one, the
Soviet Union, that the emerging nations have been unable
to steer in any direction apart from the one set out for
them.
It has been.an effective combination of persuasion,
propaganda and threat; join the club and get rich on our
terms, or we will impose that dreaded nine-letter word:
sanctions. You will be ostracised. Even governments who
understood what was going on were driven helplessly into
line. Until an India governed by a prime minister who,
through no real fault of his, cannot be sure whether he
will survive the winter in his official residence, said
India would say no. Strong governments are supposed to
stand up to the world, as Indira Gandhi did in 1971; how
on earth do weak ones manage to be so effective?
This column only promised to ask silly questions, not
give silly answers. But since we are in a party mood,
let's continue being silly.
Maybe there is a good reason why a Narasimha Rao can no
longer win elections by glowering at Pakistan. No;
patriotism has not gone out of fashion. But over time
its definition has changed. It is no longer synonymous
with anger; it is now concerned with the creation of our
own nation, not the destruction of another.
Cultural homogeneity
Maybe there is a good reason why the Muslims of
Bangladesh are migrating to Hindu-majority of India and
living under the nose of the BJP in Delhi and the Shiv
Sena in Mumbai. They have understood that partition was
a fraud, not a solution. They have realised that the
Hindu is only as good or as evil as another human being;
not the monster that was created to sustain the political
fictions of the Muslim League. They have seen that
fellow-Muslims can be bigger tyrants than foreigners.
Maybe those Bangladeshis coming to India in search of
jobs are reaffirming the cultural homogeneity and
economic interdependence of the subcontinent with their
feet, showing a courage in their hunger which the obese
political leaders of this land cannot discover in their
voices.
Maybe there is a good reason why the BJP cannot cross
that invisible barrier of acceptability. Because Indians
understand the simple mathematical principle that
division is destruction; addition is harmony and growth.
India gave the world the circle of unity over which
everything can be constructed, and it is a belief too
deeply embedded in the psyche to be dislodged by passing
passions, however strong they may be.
Maybe India could stand up against the massed ranks of
the powerful because after fifty years the fortunes of
the nation are no longer synonymous with the fortunes of
its governments. For that alone, if little else, look
back upon fifty years with pride.
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