Commentary/Dilip D'Souza
1997: Getting Better All The Time
Idon't know about you, but I am heartily sick of reading the obligatory
year-end columns that pop up all over the place around this time of year.
Even, I must admit, one I was responsible for. A New Year is for hope --
hold that laughter, you cynics -- not either misguided nostalgia or
pointless despair. For looking ahead, not for reliving moments nearly
always better forgotten.
But about the only looking ahead to 1997 that I've seen over the last few
days has come from astrologers, whose continuing ability to get themselves
taken seriously is certainly one of the greatest wool-over-the-eyes acts,
not just of 1996, but of all time. Their learned discourses apart, can you
think of any other glances forward to 1997?
I couldn't either, which is why I decided to write one for myself. Here are
just a few of the things -- nothing momentous, just ordinary things -- that
I think will happen in 1997. Though you may want to let me know, after
reading this, if 'hope' is a better word than 'think' in that last
sentence.
Sometime in the new year, we will laugh out loud at people like one Mangal
Prabhat Lodha, member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from the
Bharatiya Janata Party representing a Bombay constituency. In late
December, Lodha introduced a Bill in the assembly that would make religious
conversions illegal.
Speaking about it, he complained that Christian
missionaries were busy converting 100,000 Maharashtrian Hindus 'by various
means including allurements and force.' He went on: 'First conversion from
a religion to another takes place and then the change in the converted
person's nationalism inevitably follows.' His masterpiece of legislation is
called, if you please, the 'Freedom of Religion' Bill.
In 1997, I'm thinking, we'll remember that Hindus have no monopoly on
nationalism. Nor have Christians or Muslims or Parsis a monopoly on being
anti-national. I don't much care who gets converted to what -- in fact, I'd
be happy if everybody gave up religion altogether. But this easy connection
that the Lodhas make -- if you're non-Hindu, you're somehow not Indian --
strikes at the very moorings of our country. So who's to say who's Indian
and who's not?
I don't expect Lodha will ever understand all this, but
sometime in 1997, the rest of us will laugh him off his self-righteous
pedestal. We'll ridicule the men who try to equate religion with what they
proclaim is nationalism.
Then there are the guys who, wanting to show the world just how Indian they
really are, lose themselves in trivialities. Like a man I know who refuses
to shake a hand offered in greeting: he withdraws and folds his hands in a
very correct namaste instead. Like two people who write to me -- one from
the spiffiest address in Bombay, another from the heart of Silicon Valley
in the USA -- sprinkling their letters with 'Shri' (not 'Mr') and 'Namaste'
and 'Pranam' (certainly not 'Greetings'); never do they write 'India', it's
invariably 'Bharat.'
All of which is fine, gentlemen, but none of which makes you more or less
Indian than anyone else. You're going to find that out in 1997.
Going back to religion. Walking up the stairs to my second floor office the
other day, I passed a man who was very carefully inserting little bulbs
into a long string of sockets on the wall. The string led into an office of
the Life Insurance Corporation (the public sector guardian of millions
of Indian lives) on the first floor, where there was an unusual amount of
activity. Music was blasting and the employees were all there in shiny new
clothes.
This was unusual not because of the music. Nor the clothes. Like most of
them, this LIC office never has more than half of its desks occupied. Those
occupants are frequently either listening to the radio or drinking tea or
just asleep. This day, they were celebrating a Satyanarayana Mahapuja, a
religious ritual that public sector employees, egged on by political
aspirants, seem the most fervent about observing. They were doing so on the
time that I pay them for, in premises I pay for them to use. This was what
had galvanised the office into 100 per cent attendance.
Now I always feel confident that a time will come when we will recognise
the need to keep religion distinct, and preferably distant, from work.
Perhaps then, LIC employees will understand that doing a conscientious
day's work is a far greater tribute to the Gods than any Mahapuja can be.
That time hasn't come yet. In 1997?
Mahapujas must seem an obscene luxury in the five districts in the eastern
state of Orissa which staggered under a dreadful drought in late 1996.
Malaria and malnutrition are already rampant in that state; over 80 per
cent of the people in these areas have sunk below the poverty line. The
drought added a whole new dimension to their suffering. Wells are running
dry as the groundwater level has dropped; whole crops have failed; hundreds
of men, women and children have died needlessly.
It's a story that doesn't
even need telling: droughts have been routine happenings in India, and
especially in Orissa, for centuries. The terrible irony is that just miles
down the coast, coastal Andhra Pradesh was devastated by a cyclone and
severe flooding at the same time as the drought in Orissa.
But the real tragedy in Orissa is that the drought is seen as routine. Last
year it was eastern Maharashtra, this year Orissa, so what? It's both
tragic and galling that, going into our 50th year, we think it acceptable
that whole belts of our country are so deprived of water supplies that a
failure of one monsoon devastates thousands of lives. That we allow those
who rule us to pay attention to religious conversions, or M F Husain, or
Michael Jackson, or renaming cities -- all this, instead of getting on
towards simple goals: ensure all Indians have access to drinking water all
the time. Make our people less nakedly vulnerable to droughts.
And yes, I believe 1997 will see us demanding, from Mangal Prabhat Lodha
and his political colleagues, progress towards these goals. Besides others,
like education and health care. In our 50th year, we will realise that this
kind of progress will be the real measure of Indian-ness.
I say this because I know one thing absolutely for sure about 1997. Because
it marks 50 years since Independence, we will see a cornucopia of debate
and pronouncements, through the year, about being Indian. It happens every
year, but we'll get an overdose in 1997. The Lodhas and Thackerays and
Mulayams will define Indian-ness in all kinds of ways, none very different
from what they've managed so far, all about as destructive as before.
But in 1997, we will know what kind of reply to give them. Happy New Year!
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