Commentary/Dilip D' Souza
Real Indians are, naturally, the ones who beat
their chests about bashing Pakistan and China into peanut butter
I keep waiting, day after day. Column after column, letter to the editor after letter to the editor, email message after email message, political
passion after political passion; I wade through all of these, waiting
always. Some time, somewhere, I hope I will finally see it: a sign that on
that other side of the fence, there is space for concern for some of the
country's most urgent problems.
Like drinking water for hundreds of millions who don't have it. Like
primary education. Like toilets. Like basic health care -- not fancy
hospitals, just minimal, functioning health centres.
I wait in vain. The rath yatra man never chooses drinking water as the theme
for his yatras. My email-pals never mention health care. My columnist
colleagues never choose to write about education. It's almost as if there's
a studied, palpable aversion to these issues among all these people. So
palpable, that I begin wondering: have I got it all wrong? On some cosmic
scale, are these the really inconsequential issues? Is it really that the
Gods of various stripes care more for destroying mosques, for renaming
cities, for the various other tasks the self-appointed champions of
Hinduism undertake so very enthusiastically?
I don't know. I do know that pointing these issues out is the only way to
get the champions to say anything about them. But when you point them out,
they promptly brand you as "out of touch" with the reality of India. If you
muse about the fate of the always forgotten underprivileged, you are
dismissed as a communist; and didn't you know, that particular ideology has
gone the way of the dinosaur. Or there's the easily made, if feeble,
argument that after all India has been ruled for 50 years by "those who
share your ideology." So, they mean to imply, it's your fault in any case.
(In the same breath, they will also tell you India has had several
thousand years of culture based on Hinduism -- but no implications are
allowed there).
In this dim, two-dimensional world, if you don't agree with what they call
Hindutva, you must perforce have agreed with whoever has ruled India these
50 rather long years. (And you're a commie anyway). Actually, that's a
harmless connection to make. What's far worse is that also in this world,
the only danger to the country is from foreigners, especially the Pakistani
and Chinese breeds. Blinded by that fear, they see no danger from within,
from the continuing oblivion that the issues within must contend with. So
the true patriots, the real Indians, are, naturally, the ones who beat
their chests about bashing those countries into peanut butter. How naive,
even laughable, to worry about the threats from right here in India!
Take just one very small example that a friend who works with tribals in
Orissa wrote to me about. These desperately poor people are already reeling
under the effects of the drought that ravaged the state in 1996. Now they
face further misery. This time, it is caused by a government agency that
was set up to buy from them the produce, like tamarind, they gather in the
forest. The fair price the agency is supposed to pay them for forest
produce is a much needed supplement to their meagre incomes, the difference
between starvation and survival.
But this year, the agency has refused to buy any produce from tribals. The
reason? The price an advisory committee has set for the produce, claims the
agency, is too high, even though it is below market prices in nearby towns.
The peculiar laws under which the agency operates make it impossible for
the tribals to sell to other buyers either: in Orissa, it is illegal for
anyone but this agency to transport forest produce. Nor can the tribals
hold on to their tamarind in the hope of a resolution to this mess, for it
spoils quickly and then is worthless.
The immediate result of all this: The tribals have to sell their produce
illegally to a kind of forest mafia that pays a fraction of the price they
got last year. But the mafia is only the beginning of a whole truckload of
trouble.
"It's no wonder", writes my friend, "that these tribals are turning to the
Naxalites who come from Andhra Pradesh."
Of course, when Naxalite movements gather strength, there's much clamour on
that other side of the fence: about terrorism, how it must be dealt with
ruthlessly, what happened to the beloved TADA law, all that. But the
terrorism has its roots squarely in the poverty, the neglect, the misery,
that hundreds of millions face every single day. When these things are not
addressed, we saddle ourselves with problems like in Assam, or Punjab, or
Kashmir, or the Naxalites, or other groups like them that operate all over
the country.
That other side of the fence shows no interest in speaking about, let alone
addressing, these roots. There are other priorities, other preoccupations.
There's a rath yatra about a temple and a mosque. What improvement that
brought to even a single Indian life, quite apart from the destruction it
brought to thousands, L K Advani has not felt the need to explain to us.
There's the loud furore about conversions. Yes, the missionary fervour of
the Church scares the daylights out of me. That 70 per cent of India has no
sanitation, that 50 per cent cannot read and write, these things scare me much
more. It's that simple.
We have that vapid injunction to "Love India or leave it!" Vapidity is one
thing. But nobody asked those tribals in Orissa, to whom this can hardly be
a choice, or have any meaning at all.
And there's the grave talk of the territorial integrity of India. But never
of the integrity of the lives within India.
Because we so easily distract ourselves from what is really important in
this country, the country is being undermined in the most insidious way of
all: from inside, by the misery we have subjected our own people to.
So I wait, I wonder. I know why the politicians who wear the shining
Hindutva cloak never speak of these things. You generate far less passion
by asking for toilets than you do by asking for a mosque to be pulled down.
Passion, don't we know, translates quite well into votes. That's an
equation politicians like. They must do as their compulsions dictate.
But what about the others? The columnists, the email-pals, the activists,
the letter-writers, the sympathisers who congregate on that other side of
the fence? Why don't they raise the concerns that are utterly basic to the
overwhelming majority of Indians?
There are two very simple answers to that question. One, that they just do
not care about such concerns. Two, the Hindutva they profess, the
Hinduism they are so eager to defend, does not care about these concerns
either.
Which leads to this final little truth: theirs is really not Hindutva, not
Hinduism. Because above all, those ideas must show us the way to improve
lives. That's the only test that matters. In the form that they are on
offer, there on that other side of the fence, they are failing it badly.
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