In terms of personal integrity and decency, the Parliamentary communists may be the least odious of all our politicians. They do not, for example, have Swiss bank accounts. They are not often to be seen in five-star hotels. Many of them have a deep sympathy with the poor and excluded. However, they have, when in power, energetically promoted party loyalists in the bureaucracy, the police, and perhaps most depressingly, the academy. Kolkata University, once an institution of high quality, has been destroyed on account of all senior positions having to be vetted, first by the party’s ideologues in Alimuddin Street.
The ideology itself is astonishingly archaic. The Nepali Maoist ideologue Baburam Bhattarai says his party wishes to ‘try out a new model which will incorporate the ideas of Gandhi, Lohia, Marx, Lenin and be a synthesis of all’. His leader, Comrade Prachanda, often speaks of the Buddha with admiration. Their Indian comrades, on the other hand, get all their inspiration from more distant quarters.
The annual congresses of the CPI (M) always feature four portraits on the dais. These are of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin—that is to say, two 19th century German thinkers, and two 20th century Russian dictators. I do hope that in my lifetime I will see pictures placed at CPI (M) meetings of representative Indian democrats, such as (for example) Gandhi and Ambedkar.
VI
To function moderately well, a democracy needs three sectors to pull their weight—the state, private enterprise, and civil society. In the 1950s and 1960s, when entrepreneurs were timid and risk-averse, and civil society was non-existent, the state performed superbly well. In 2011, it appears to be civil society which is performing best of all. There are hundreds of hard-working and selfless social activists, working in the fields of education, health, environment, women’s rights, consumer protection, civil liberties and more. The private sector, on the other hand, is marked by both visionaries and marauders; whereas ten years ago it was the philanthrophists who defined the trends, now it is the crooks and cronies who appear to enjoy more power and influence.
To restore faith in the idea of India, a more capable, focused and honest political class may be necessary.
Meanwhile, we can take succour in the manifest intentions of the citizenry, who, despite the provocations of the extremes, continue to hold democracy and diversity in high regard. Outside of Gujarat, hardline Hindutva has repeatedly been rejected by the electorate (as demonstrated most recently in Bihar, where keeping Narendra Modi out of their campaign helped the NDA to a spectacular victory in the state elections). The acts of Islamist terror in Mumbai, Delhi, and elsewhere have not been followed by religious scapegoating or rioting. Likewise, peasants and adivasis in areas of Maoist influence regularly defy them by participating enthusiastically in state and national elections, thus proving, incidentally, that ours is not a democracy for the bourgeoisie alone. And while the Centre must be more sensitive to the sentiments of citizens on our borderlands, it is striking that, even as the stone-throwing proceeded in Kashmir, shawl merchants were seen conducting brisk business in Kerala, while thousands of students from the two states in the north-east hardest hit by insurgency—Manipur and Nagaland—studied peacably and with dignity in Bangalore, Puné and Hyderabad.
The decent instincts of the citizenry were also at display when they rejected, quietly and without any fuss, the campaign launched before the 2004 campaign to portray the leader of the Congress party as a foreigner. By speaking of the dangers of a ‘Rome Raj’ led by ‘Antonia Maino Gandhi’, the xenophobes hoped to catalyse the base instincts of Indians in general and Hindus in particular. Outside the Hindutva faithful, the call found no resonance whatsoever. Voters made it clear that they would judge Mrs Gandhi by other criteria. Her birth in Italy and her Catholic upbringing were immaterial. By four decades of continuous residence on Indian soil she had claimed the right to be an Indian. To be sure, there remain many Indians who are unhappy with the promotion of a family cult, and many others who are critical of the Congress President’s social and economic policies. But her European ancestry does not matter at all. Like the Rajasthani achar-seller in Kochi, she is free, as a citizen of India, to exercise her vocation where she pleases. We will assess her wares as they appear to us—and accept or reject them as we please.
Based as it is on dialogue, compromise, reciprocity and accomodation, the idea of India does not appeal to those who seek quick and total solutions to human problems. It thus does not seem to satisfy ideologues of left or right, as well as romantic populists. To these skeptics, let me offer one final vignette. One Independence Day, I was driving from Bangalore to Melkoté, a temple town in southern Karnataka which incidentally also houses a celebrated Gandhian ashram. The first part of the drive was humdrum, through the ever extending conurbation of Greater Bangalore. Then we turned off the Mysore highway, and the countryside became more varied and interesting. Somewhere between Mandya and Melkoté we passed a bullock cart. Three young boys were sitting in it; one wore a suit with spectacles, a second a bandgala with a Mysore peta atop his little head, the third a mere loin cloth.
The boys had evidently just come back from a function in their school, where, to mark 15th August, they had chosen to play the roles of B. R. Ambedkar, M. Visvesvaraya, and M. K. Gandhi, respectively. Remarkably, none of their heroes were native Kannada speakers. Yet all spoke directly to their present and future. The boys knew and revered Ambedkar as the person who gave dignity and hope for the oppressed; knew and revered Visvesvaraya for using modern technology for the social good, as in the canals from the Kaveri that irrigated their own fathers’ fields; and knew and revered Gandhi for promoting religious harmony and leading, non-violently, the country’s fight for freedom.
The vision of those young boys was capaciously inclusive. Ideologists may oppose Ambedkar to Gandhi; historians may know that Gandhi and Visvesvaraya disagreed on the importance of industrialisation in economic development. Yet the boys understood what partisans and scholars do not—that our country today needs all three, for all were Indians of decency and integrity, all seeking sincerely to mitigate human suffering, all embodying legacies worthy of being deepened in our own age. What I saw that day was a spontaneous, magnificent illustration of the idea of India. To more fully redeem that idea would mean, among other things, matching the pluralism that those schoolboys articulated, with the democracy defended so precisely by the Muria school-teacher in Dantewada.
This article was published in Outlook on January 31, 2011.
Table of Contents
A Note on the Series
A Note on the Author
The Enemies of the Idea of India
The Enemies of the Idea of India Page 3