A salute to India

Islamabad diary
Now when was the last time news from India gave such a high? Half a decanter of the right stuff – I am purposely not using the word bottle, bottle a no-no word in our climate, too obvious and therefore against our grain because we prefer our truth veiled and in shadows. So if I may complete the sentence: half a decanter of Scotland’s finest would not give such a high, such a kick, as the news from Bihar.
It’s not just the prime minister but the BJP and the RSS who’ve got their come-uppance and so convincingly, with nothing left to the imagination: the BJP, or the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance, winning 58 seats in the 243-member state assembly, the Nitish Kumar and Lalu Prasad Yadav alliance smashing the Hindutva brigade by taking 178 seats. The pollsters had been predicting otherwise, most pointing to a close race and the NDTV predicting a landslide for Prime Minister Narendra Modi. It’s not the first time the best and brightest have been proved so utterly wrong.
We should learn to take the full name of the RSS: Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, a Nazi party look-alike but in an Indian setting. The Nazis favoured jackboots and military uniforms. RSS rank-and-file look funny in their khaki shorts as they practice drill in the mornings. They also carry lathis and their aim is to turn India into a Hindu India, a Fortress of Hinduism, so to speak, as a counterpart perhaps to our own Fortress of Islam, because we in Pakistan travelled the Hindutva route first, Hindutva, I hasten to add, here being used as a metaphor for ideologies gone wild and bizarre. The Taliban and the RSS are two sides of the same coin – the Taliban native to our north-west mountains, the RSS native to India.
Narendra Modi is an RSS disciple and worker, deriving his inspiration and ideology from there. And it says something of our sense of history that Nawaz Sharif thought he was on to a smart thing when he went to attend Narendra Modi’s swearing-in ceremony. Anyway, just as the Modi defeat in Bihar is a defeat not just for him but the whole idea of a Hindu India, the coalition victory in the state is a victory for the idea of secularism and tolerance.
Let us denounce India for what it does in its part of Kashmir. Indian secularism ends where Kashmir begins. But let us not deny India the distinction – if this be not too hard a word to swallow – that its polity and constitution otherwise are based on the idea of secularism – the notion that religion belongs to the sphere of the individual, not to the working of the state. Our constitution of course is different. But what Jinnah Sahib said in his Aug 11, 1947, address to the Constituent Assembly was something very akin to secularism.
Of course he never used the word secularism, a circumstance which the holy brotherhood of mullahs and assorted religious scholars, with powerful help from wide sections of the media, has always seized upon and made much of. But his political ideas were secular and indeed his first differences with Mahatma Gandhi arose from the fact that the Mahatma was injecting a religious idiom into the discourse of the Indian nationalist movement.
It is also fair to say that Jinnah was opposed to Gandhi’s methods, believing that the cause of Indian freedom was best advanced through constitutional means. History vindicated his stance because India eventually gained freedom not through armed struggle or civil disobedience but through a constitutional path agreed to between the colonial power and the parties representing different shades of Indian opinion.
But I am digressing. The news from India lately was bad, almost unbelievable: Hindutva zealots on the rampage, minorities feeling scared and threatened, people being killed for their beliefs, someone (a poor Muslim) dragged out of his house and beaten to death because of the rumour that his family had eaten beef, and artists and writers, to their enormous credit, returning their awards in protest against this tide of intolerance.
This was madness on a grand scale. Writing in the New York Review of Books Dr Amatya Sen quotes the new head of the Indian Council of Cultural Relations, Dr Lokesh Chandra, appointed by the Modi government, informing the Indian Express that “from a practical point of view (Modi) supersedes the Mahatma (Gandhi).” Dr Sen further quotes Chandra as saying that Modi is, in fact, “a reincarnation of God.”
The Bihar election comes as a sharp slap in the face to all this nonsense.
Many of us were a bit too quick to write off Indian secularism. We were assuming that the forces of bigotry and fanaticism unleashed by Narendra Modi and the RSS were here to stay and this was the India that everyone, Indians and outsiders, would have to live with. In the event, as Bihar has shown, India is too diverse and varied a land to be put into any straitjacket.
Yes, if Bihar would have succumbed to the Modi assault – the prime minister campaigned very hard, putting his standing and prestige on the line, and the BJP did its best to communalise the election – it would have been a different story. Liberal India would have been cowed down and Hindu resurgent India would have felt more emboldened. But just in time hubris has received a severe rebuff.
And it’s good for India that this has happened, although Pakistanis would be justified in feeling a bit cheated. Modi and the RSS were a good stick with which to lay about India. Bihar, in that respect, has taken the fun out of the proceedings. Intelligentsia-type Pakistanis, the pontificating types, were feeling a bit superior. But it’s all been premature, Bihar taking the wind out of our sails.
Remember what happened in Pakistan – piety was being shoved down our throats, and this tendency was not just verbal or philosophical, it was backed by the power of violence. It’s good that our Jamaat-e-Islami has now turned to khidmat and philanthropy but time was when it stood for danda-bardar or lathi-wielding Islam. Under the impetus of the Afghan ‘jihad’ the lathi turned into the Kalashnikov and with the Taliban (the TTP) came the era of throat-slitting and suicide bombings.
Our Indian cousins should count their blessings. They have only had the RSS and its funny khaki shorts. This is not to minimise the violence that has happened here and there across India. Still, the kind of stuff Pakistan has gone through Indians would be hard put even to imagine.
But we are of this region, belonging to the same landmass. There is no escaping this. Just as all Europeans - -whether German or French or English – are of the same continent and heirs to the same cultural tradition going back to the Greeks and the Romans, we of the Subcontinent, despite all our differences and rivalries, also carry a common burden of history. In Europe have occurred the most terrible wars in history. But after all their travails Europeans have learned to live in peace and resolve their differences through peaceful means.
The problems of the Subcontinent won’t disappear overnight. There will be Siachen to discuss and Sir Creek and, above all, Kashmir. But there is no settling these disputes through armed conflict. This is the lesson of our own wars. Sabre-rattling thus is to no purpose. India-Nepal relations, India-Bangladesh relations and India-Pakistan relations could all do with a lighter touch and a better understanding of each other’s point of view.
At the height of the cold war it was possible to board a train in Moscow and go across the Iron Curtain. China has opened its borders, the Berlin Wall is a distant memory but there’s a wall stronger than the Iron Curtain between India and Pakistan. We were better off before the 1965 war when even though the Kashmir dispute was fresh, fresher than it is today, the Indo-Pak relationship was easier. That war changed so much. If only, through some miracle because it will take nothing less, we could return to those simpler times.
Email: bhagwal63@gmail.com