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