[Reader-list] The broken idea of India

Javed javedmasoo at gmail.com
Wed Aug 29 10:28:49 IST 2012


The broken idea of India

The strife in Assam and beyond shows that our Indianness itself is an
oppressive shackle

Jay Mazoomdaar
Independent Journalist

THE ANTHEM sung and the flag folded, the media quickly moved on to
exclusives, and the social media to other anniversaries. Coalgate was
already big. Then, a mini-exodus of the mongoloid-looking from
mainland India to the Northeast got us — the opportunistic and the
righteous — busy. An opportunistic writer frequently blamed for
righteousness, I could not join the what-has-befallen-India chorus
this time. Worse, I do not even have an intellectual excuse.

Some hardliners targeted people from the Northeast far away from the
riotous scenes of Assam, where the resident and the outsider have been
fighting each other for decades. Not too long ago, Bal Thackeray’s
underlings tried to bully Biharis (and before that the Madrasis) out
of Mumbai and the youth attacked Mumbai-bound trains across Bihar.
Thousands of Hindi- speaking migrants have been persecuted in the
Northeast and hassled in Tamil Nadu over decades. Even Bengalis resent
the Marwari takeover of their businesses in Kolkata.

So does it really help that domestic migration is a constitutional
right? Are we really one people who merely forget our Indian identity
once too often? Or, is our Indianness a wishful construct too delicate
to hold its ground against so many real and rooted identities? If the
latter is true, what do we make of the very rationale of India?

A few happy jalebis are my first memory of tricolour hoisting. Even in
commie Bengal, schoolboys easily developed into endearing
nationalists. India was Kapil Dev and Rakesh Sharma, Reita Faria and
PT Usha, and not Pakistan. JC Bose, the Indian scientist who lost out
to that Italian Marconi, was an icon of compulsive
anti-establishmentarianism that was to surge and swallow us later at
College Street. Young coffee house revolutionaries did question
democracy but never quite nationhood.

The day Narasimha Rao’s Congress lost the 1996 general elections that
threw up a hung Parliament, it felt very much like a personal triumph
when a gallivanting African student gushed disbelievingly about how
the roads were so busy and life absolutely normal. Back home, he said,
the military would have moved in immediately. Not for nothing did we
grow up believing in India.

A decade and a half later, experience should have strengthened that
conviction. It has not. Sunil Khilnani has written more than 200 pages
on it and many feel he should have written more. At Twitter length,
the idea of India is secular, and plural. But what is the Indian
identity that justifies the geographic limits of this nation? If it
binds a Naga with a Kashmiri, it can very well connect an Afghan to a
Burmese. Tamil students abroad naturally gravitate towards their
Lankan mates and the Punjabis seek out Pakistanis. The British, after
all, tried to govern the entire subcontinent from Kabul to Rangoon as
an undivided unit.

One does not have to pore over the complex annals of the 1940s to
conclude that the territorial limits of the Indian nation, set by
political convenience, were incidental. It was an arrangement,
possibly the best one forgeable 65 years ago, with obvious merits. The
tradition of huge joint families drew from the benefits of economy of
scale, pooled resources and common expenditure. Look back at the
intricate state boundaries on an early map of India and imagine the
military expenditure involved in guarding thousands of kilometres of
additional borders on both sides had those provinces become separate
nations.

This smart arrangement required its symbols to subsume regional
identities. While Pakistan’s failure to deal with Bengali nationalism
created a new nation, India has so far staved off balkanisation at a
cost reasonable to many. Regional nationalists here have been mostly
happy carving out new states within the nation. While religious
frissons posed much bigger problems in Punjab and Kashmir,
parliamentary politics rapidly internalised caste identities.

But Indianness remains an imaginary brand. It works when the
arrangement that is India clicks. When a cricket team picked from
eight corners of the country succeeds on the strength of the talent
pool; when states do not need to pay import duty on basmati from
Punjab, terracotta from Bengal or Kanjivarams from Tamil Nadu; when
the benefits of the arrangement that is India is reasonably shared
among many different Indias. When that does not happen, the construct
requires an assortment of forces for sustenance. Bollywood has often
come handy. But places such as Kashmir and the Northeast got more used
to off-screen gunfire.

It is not a coincidence that anti-India sentiments are more vocal in
the physical extensions of the zmainland, far away from the so-called
mainstream, the relative homogeneity. Only free referendums can tell
if these secessionist demands have mass legitimacy. That apart, the
aspiration, and therefore resentment, of different regional
nationalisms is not unnatural within such a mega arrangement. Be it
the water wars or tussles over electricity sharing, mutually hostile
states of India do engage with one another within broad democratic
norms.

But there are two Indias which rarely acknowledge the rest — a third
India — while living off it.

‘Chinki’ does sound offensive. If mainlanders could identify a
Manipuri from a Naga or Mizo or Sikkimese by their looks, language or
accent, they would have invented community-specific terms such as
Gujju, Mallu, Bong, Ghati and so on. All these terms can be
derogatory. But why does a Bihari often get more offended when called
a bhaiya (or simply a Bihari) than a Tamilian when referred to as a
Tam? Why is a well-to-do Bihari, let’s say in Lutyen’s Delhi, less
likely to be miffed by this regional name-calling than a jobseeker
from Patna? Richer states build a more respectable image for their
people. Economically secure individuals tend to care even less for
such collectives.

Physical attributes apart, the term ‘chinki’ often implies a fast
lifestyle and easy (even commercial) availability. Such innuendos
easily hurt workers in low-paying, menial, odd and long-hour jobs. Up
the economic and social ladder, such barbs lose sting and become
nearly inconsequential. Imagine someone calling a Bhupen Hazarika, a
James Lyngdoh, or a Chokila Tshering (Iyer) a ‘chinki’ in their face.

No socialist magic can or should make all Indians equally moneyed or
equal achievers. But what each of them, communities and individuals,
deserved and still deserve are equal opportunities to benefit from the
experiment that is India. The wait continues.

This I-Day, I heard Dr Singh speak for about half an hour. We have
heard prime ministers at the Red Fort before. It certainly takes rare
skill and temperament to repeat the same promises without sounding
embarrassed for not delivering yet and still hoping to convince the
nation to fall for it all over again. Clearly, this mock routine
cannot go on without the audience’s indulgence.

Every year, besides false promises, the Prime Minister’s address
contains certain concessions for the aam aadmi. It works because the
grand collective of the common man has long been a misnomer in India
where the political and economic dialogues are limited to the ruling
elite, and the (rural and urban) middleclass, the de facto aam aadmi.

This aam aadmi does not really mind the false promises as long as he
benefits from the concessions and the hand-me-down privileges such as
farm subsidies, a range of IT jobs, reservations, and an FMCG boom.
They include the small businessmen, the salaried class, the landed
farmer and can be almost rich, nearly poor and anything in between.
The destitute majority that governments struggle to reduce on paper by
pulling down the poverty line is rarely spoken to, either by this aam
aadmi or the power elite. The first holds the poor in fearful
contempt, the latter uses them as ballot fodder.

This I-Day, the Prime Minister said: “Time has now come to view the
issues that affect our development processes as matters of national
security. If we do not increase the pace of the country's economic
growth, take steps to encourage new investment in the economy, improve
the management of government finances and work for the livelihood
security of the common man (emphasis mine) and energy security of the
country, then it most certainly affects our national security.”

His common man could not have been those, depending on the the
fast-changing sarkari definition of poverty, 37-77 percent of Indians.
That Indian majority does not understand the aspiring superpower’s
development and growth rush. They are not bothered about scams because
corruption to them meant total disempowerment long ago. Really, what
do people who do not remember when they last had a potato, make of or
care about livelihood and energy debates?

NO DOUBT some churning, from the poor to the middle class and from
there to the ruling elites, has taken place. That is inevitable in our
centrifuge grinder and, by far, so deeply admired because so few
escape the grind. But 65 long years after the nation was founded on
the principle of equal opportunity, do we dare ask hundreds of
millions of destitute Indians if they are happy with the arrangement
that is India, if Indianness makes any sense to them, or if they care
for national security?

That will be some referendum.

The biggest threat to national security, we are told by the State, is
the Left-wing extremism in the tribal heartland of India. The excesses
of kangaroo courts and bloody ambushes of the red brigade make most of
us, the ruling elite and the middle class, concur that the innocent
tribal is being manipulated and the nation held to ransom. Certain
romantic intellectuals eloquently disagree but the communities that
the Naxals claim to defend are getting increasingly vocal against the
ideological and moral corruption of the so-called revolutionaries.

A thousand years ago, Baghdad became the world’s most prominent centre
of liberal learning. As recently as in the 1970s, when the Baath Party
kept religion out of political life, the veil was an uncommon sight
and bars flourished in many neighbourhoods. In two wars in the name of
neutralising Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction (which
remained elusive), that secular Iraq was laid waste by the US. Any
common man in India knows all about the plot: It is the oil, silly!

If we attach other identities to the destitute majority of Indians,
the single biggest population would turn out as tribal, geographically
concentrated in the contiguous states of Maharashtra, Chhattisgarh,
Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Jharkhand and West Bengal. History and forest
surveys know them as laidback but free-spirited people, living in sync
with nature. Atrocities committed by the British and Indian State
forced them to pick up arms. Today, each indiscriminate assault by
security forces in the garb of fighting Naxalism pushes them further
into resistance. Yet, few aam aadmi dare whisper: It is the ore, isn’t
it?

If there was a separate tribal nation outside the arrangement that is
India, it would require an invasion and a full-scale war to perpetrate
the kind of loot of minerals and coal that we have been witnessing for
decades. Loot, because the contracts for mining are offered at
shockingly low prices, disregarding all environmental and local
livelihood concerns and the profits bring no tangible benefit to the
tribal. The spoils “uplift” a few local elites and some more
elsewhere. The concessions bring investment and create jobs for the
middle-class. This is India’s national interest. This justifies
routine trampling of any tribal resistance against mining, mega
factories or power plants by mobilising forces across states as part
of anti-insurgency operations.

Yet, only America’s wars are imperial aggression; ours are waged to
defend democracy.

Much has been spoken about the resilience of our democracy, about the
miracle of consistently significant turnouts of largely illiterate and
impoverished voters during elections that frequently topple mighty
governments. At the same time, elections are manipulated in ways much
more complex than mundane rigging. In Assam, for example, successive
Congress governments have allowed systemic influx of people from
neighbouring Bangladesh in exchange for electoral loyalty.

In the context of Indianness, these illegal migrants could well be
counted among our people 65 years ago. Today, they threaten to edge
out the resident tribal from the local economy that is anyway in
tatters, having been all but abandoned by the arrangement that is
India. Worse, the BJP and its allied organisations, the principal
political opposition to the Congress, is milking away what is
essentially an economic and political crisis for its communal
potential just because the majority of the migrants in question
happens to be Muslims, creating room for an Islamic backlash on anyone
looking Mongoloid across the country.

Yet, the average poor Indian’s awareness of the value of her vote is
no myth. After each verdict for change, the transition of power has
always been gracious, barring the Emergency. Even the military has
consistently stuck to its honourable apolitical tradition. The
maturity of it all impresses visitors from banana republics but does
not change much on ground.

Does that sound paradoxical? It isn’t really.

India does not erupt every time a government falls because the one
that follows is not fundamentally very different from its predecessor.
Big money that ultimately runs the show has long stopped playing
favourites and is so entrenched across political lines that it does
not really care which combination holds power.

Compare the key economic policies of the Congress, the BJP and some of
their key allies such as the NCP or the BJD. Most major parties of
India are on the same page on the FDI or the FTA and the extent to
which foreign governments (read USA) and MNCs can influence those
policies. Only last week, KN Govindacharya (yes, of all people)
advised the Congress and the BJP to fight the next Lok Sabha poll
together.

The resulting polarisation, of the poor and the rest of India, is
becoming so stark that it has got the middle class worrying about
reprisals. Recently, a friend planning to return from the US for good
sounded unsure if his little fortune would stand out and make him a
class enemy of sorts. While laughing it off, I could tell that he was
thinking of shelving the family’s long-time dream of owning an
“independent house with a slice of lawn” in favour of a duplex in a
secure, gated apartment complex.

Moreover, the splendid unconcern of the ruling elite has now started
riling even the lower rungs of the middleclass. The ugly clash in
Maruti’s Manesar factory in Haryana did not involve any destitute
Indian. It was one section of the middle class turning its anger
against the corporate management (backed by the state machinery) on
another section of its own.

Whichever way it dawns, the realisation that the arrangement that is
India is not quite working for the majority can make the middle class
aware of its critical power as the driver of the so-called Indian
tiger. Simultaneously the biggest producing and consuming force, it
can potentially turn around the Indian story, but for its customary
inertia.

It is still very much business as usual while battle lines are getting
edgier by the day. But as long as the state abuses its own, do we have
any right to demand loyalty from the abused to this lopsided
arrangement that is India? While persecuting, dispossessing and
murdering people for their resources, can we really complain that the
victims are too stupid and obdurate to see their interest in “the
national interest”?

Or, is it time we accept that all Indian-born who die fighting for her
land do not die Indian?

Jay Mazoomdaar is an Independent Journalist.
jaymazoomdaar at gmail.com
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main53.asp?filename=Op010912Broken.asp


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