Al-zakir
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SANKARSHAN THAKUR
When the chorus of Cassandras rises, it helps to reflect on where we were and where we are. Despite unfulfilled promises, grim prognoses and failed messiahs, an undeniable feature stands out: the republic has endured
India in crisis is everyday’s story unceasingly told. The story that often gets short shrift is the story of our perpetual mutiny against those crises. India almost teases miracles in the way it withstands or surmounts the many tides — chronic and extant — that besiege it. And in doing so it probably leaves most Indians confounded.
Look at the banknotes we daily use. None of us can even hope to begin deciphering them; there are eighteen scripts embossed on each one and more linguistic constituencies are agitating to be represented. Differences of caste, creed, class and tongue mean that most Indians are unfamiliar with the lives of most other Indians.
Imperial eminences — John Strachey, Winston Churchill, et al — weren’t the last ones to flag the impossibility of India or to predict the collapse of the entity that emerged from colonial rule in 1947, sundered and bloodied: as recently as the 1980s, Indira Gandhi was trotting out the threat of “Balkanisation” to successfully rally support.
Until quite recently, Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul wrote only darkly about India, and most of what he had to say was prescient. M.J. Akbar’s India: The Siege Within was written in a volatile moment two decades ago when India seemed about to crack — Sikh separatism in Punjab, the renewed clamour for self-determination in Kashmir, the spew of religious fundamentalism, Indira’s assassination and the consequent street mayhem.
It passed. And more came and passed. The turbulence of Mandir and Mandal, Rajiv’s assassination, the Babri demolition, the Gujarat carnage, tsunami and quake, flood and famine, terror sharking from dateline to dateline, finally barging ashore in Mumbai.
But India has a way of shrugging off setbacks and lumbering on, a quality that earned the nation just concessions in Naipaul’s later work. And Akbar might want to update his pulsating report of alarm with calmer analysis.
As Ramachandra Guha said of the country’s coming of age in India After Gandhi, “secessionist movements are active here and there, but there is no longer any fear that India will follow the former Yugoslavia and break up into a dozen fratricidal parts. The powers of the state are sometimes grossly abused, but no one seriously thinks that India will emulate neighbouring Pakistan.”
At the heart of the country’s endurance against odds, perhaps, lies the liberal-democratic ethic wrought deep into the nation’s political consciousness during the Nehru era — so deep that his daughter Indira was shamed into calling elections within two years of declaring the Emergency. She was cast out in the 1977 elections, but rode back to power on a huge mandate in 1980. Indians felt, justifiably, that their mammoth, often unwieldy country was fairly a creature of their will.
Indians are wont to dispose of emergencies, big ‘E’ or small. Neither the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 nor the slaughter of Muslims in Gujarat a decade later has driven the country’s most populous minority east or west into Bangladesh or Pakistan. Balasaheb Thackeray is a virulent, Hitler-loving bigot but his appeal remains contained within a precinct of Mumbai. Secession remains a live cry in India’s Northeast and in Kashmir, but both sets of separatists are in some form of dialogue with the government, even though elements haven’t forsaken arms.
India’s problems are manifold. Primary education and healthcare are still widely unavailable. Large swathes of this nuclear-power nation still have no access to water or electricity. Caste-based discrimination remains rampant enough for leaders to create militant political constituencies out of those that consider themselves victimised. To ignore any of India’s many new mutinies would be to court ugly surprises.
The slow burn of Naxalism, or armed ultra-Leftwing rebellion, along the country’s impoverished border with Nepal probably holds in store many more terrible lessons about the pitfalls of iniquitous growth.
Inequality is the key problem. People are trying to discover ways of securing their rightful share in what they are being told is a prosperous place; they are impatient and their frustration can increasingly lead them to extra-democratic resorts, as actions of caste-rights groups like the Gujjars of Rajasthan, or rising get-rich-quick urban crime, may suggest.
There has never been any dearth of bad news from India; of late, there has been an awful lot of good news too. Three incumbencies have recently been re-elected in Delhi, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan; the only discernible common strain was that all these were governments seen to have worked towards what they promised. Narendra Modi of Gujarat is increasingly keen to project himself as modern developer rather than bigoted demagogue.
Is that a sign of a new voter-ethic pegged on performance rather than caste or creed? We’ve been badgered by a slew of terror attacks and yet there has been no resort to a mindless backlash anywhere. Are we wiser now to abuse by vested interests? A young man has coasted to office on an unprecedented vote in Jammu and Kashmir. Will Omar Abdullah — and in a wider sense Rahul Gandhi — become rallyists of a new “involved” youth?
Moot questions, all, but then India cannot have been the story of negatives alone. India is what quietly happens between the bad and the good — a country living and prospering in its few unbroken, and largely unnoticed, emancipated practices: universal adult suffrage; uninterrupted democracy (barring the 19-month aberration of the Emergency which Indira Gandhi voluntarily corrected); justiciable fundamental and liberal rights.
India is destined to glory in her divides, that’s what makes her a mosaic rather than a monolith. The country, time and again, has affirmed the larger faiths Indians have imbued her with; in many ineffable ways, the sum of their common benefits has far outweighed their cumulated contradictions. The late John Kenneth Galbraith, John F. Kennedy’s ambassador to India in the formative and critical early 1960s, was bemused enough by the contrary continuum he witnessed to call India a functioning anarchy.
Half a century later, that still sounds apt.
Accoridng to this artical writen by an Indian hindu person who pointed out that abused minority muslims either fled to Bangladesh or Pakistan for sake of their well being. What's our respected Indian members think about this report?
The Telegraph - Calcutta (Kolkata) | Frontpage | India works
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