Professor Satendra Nandan
Satendra Nandan
Professor Satendra Nandan’s new book, Nadi: Memories of a River is due out soon. He’s currently working on a volume of his experiences in Fiji,
India and Australia.
On Monday, amid glittering fanfare and massive security in a imperially designed building glorifying the Raj, Shri Narendra Damodardas Modi was sworn in as India’s 15th prime minister.
The election of the BJP candidate Mr Modi to the Indian Parliament and his subsequent elevation to the highest elected office in the nation is a matter of deepest consequences, both for India and the global community’s goodwill towards the Indian people.
In the euphoria of election victory and its gaudy celebrations one can be forgiven for supporting uncritically the triumphalism that accompanies such events.
In a nation where millions live by ritualism and myriad symbols, the analysis of what has happened in India is often ignored: a collective amnesia sets in with the chanting of mantras and ablutions to myriad gods and goddesses.
Albert Einstein, when he was offered the Presidency of Israel in 1952, said: Politics is for a moment. An equation is for eternity.
The equation of equality is important in India. Modi’s was MG2—minimum government, maximum governance.
Doubtless Modi will bring about changes in the Indian economic landscape and possibly in the implementation of radical social policies for the aspirations of a billion people.
The other 250,000,000 are doing reasonably well.
However, one vital question that will be raised among many Indians is: Who is an Indian? The river from which the term Hinduism and Indian is derived now flows primarily in Pakistan, created in 1947, though there’s an Indus Water Treaty between the two hostile sovereign states, after almost 70 years of independence.
Marking the beginning of a new era in Indian politics, Narendra Modi (right), was sworn in Prime Minister on Monday at the Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi. Photo: Neeraj Priyadarshi
How the European Community has constantly reinvented itself after the two most terrible wars in human history may have a genuine lesson for the Indian subcontinent.
The past is a problem. Patriotic Hindus claim they have the oldest continuous culture in the world. That distinction, I think, goes to the Aboriginal people on the Australian island continent. Besides, the old is not gold.
Some Hindus, in a frenzy of cultural chauvinism, claim that their culture is 900,000 years old. There is of course no limit to national or cultural exaggeration. And these are meaningless claims by people who lack confidence and suffer from many historical complexes.
As India’s first PM had written: Cultured people don’t talk of culture; they simply live it.
A tiger doesn’t have to flaunt his tigeritude. It’s simply there in its movements and eyes burning brightly in the forests of the night.
It is claimed the aircraft, the nuclear bomb, were all invented by the Hindu sages long before the migrant American scientists split the first atom. The world is now loaded with the Christian, the Communist, the Jewish, the Chinese, the Hindu and the Islamic bombs.
This would be farcical were it not so potentially disastrous. And Australia remained undiscovered below God Ganesha’s elephantine nose.
I’ve no doubt soon someone will claim that the computer, which has revolutionised the modern world and the confluence of cultures into an increasingly universal civilisation, was invented in the Indus valley.
After all, Lord Ganesha rides on a mouse—and it is really the click of the high-tech mouse that now defines our universe of global communication and rat race. The story of our human civilisation is one of pride as well as shame. It has been said that ‘Every document of civilisation is at the same time a document of barbarism’.
No culture is free of its barbarities and its imaginings of the beauties of our world. That is what has shaped our flawed but unfinished humanity. A cure discovered in another part of our planet becomes our daily medicine. We know the democratic freedoms, human rights, civil liberties and a million other privileges came to us through religious and scientific developments, colonial conquests, imperial impositions, nationalistic struggles, individual courage and crossing borders.
The tragic vanity of western civilisation, in the past 500 years, was that it claimed to have done it exclusively by its knowledge, exploration, exploitation, science, institutions and language.
FUNDAMENTAL ISSUES
Mr Modi’s prime ministership raises fundamental issues in India’s political culture. His record as a leader in Gujarat is seriously questionable—there is a dark streak in the trail he leaves behind in the state of Gujarat and that mephitic atmosphere will be felt in New Delhi.
One can be sure that investigative and enquiring minds are already busy digging in the graves of the dead.
The pens and computers are churning out reams of writings. It depends how deep you want to dig—whether where the Babri masjid was or where the more recent dead are buried or burnt.
If he can swing the tide in favour of economic prosperity, enlightened social interaction and integration, political stability and bury his pointlessly controversial and polarising personality, he’s likely to succeed.
After all, who remembers the murderous men who drove tanks on the students in the Tiananmen Square or the monks self-immolating themselves on the roof of the world.
Business is business
But like the forces behind Modi’s political success –the big business names, corporatised media, the faceless campaign funders,–similar forces are now gathering as his opposition.
As Modi has himself remarked during the riots in Gujarat: Every action has its reaction.
It would be naïve to write off the wily Congress or the Communists or the Dalits or the regional parties: If Modi’s campaign was fuelled by the seemingly sinister Hindutva agenda, there are other religions and sects in India with equally satanic agendas.
By sheer chance I saw last week a secretly filmed documentary on the SBS Dateline programme. It paints a horrific picture of what happened in Gujarat in 2002.
The graphic killing of the Congress MP Ehsan Zafri, as described by the man who was at the centre of it all, will chill your soul. That it should have been done to a thousand others is to understand what the poet Vyasa had imagined in The Mahabharata, the great doomsday epic of the Aryans.
Nirad Chaudhuri’s book, ‘The Continent of Circe’, captures the militancy of the Hindu psyche vividly and frighteningly.
Of course one knows what happened in the Second World War—the holocaust so systematically perpetrated by the most philosophically complex and scientifically sophisticated culture in the world.
In Germany it was the banality of evil— the easy acceptance of it by millions who thought they will benefit from it.
Mr Modi is no Hitler although several commentators have high-lighted this image–Hitler, too, got elected in the face of a weak government and a people’s humiliation and the promise of false racial-religious pride.
There are, however, many ideologues in the RSS, a fascist organisation founded in 1925 and modelled on European fascism, the Bajrang dal—the monkey brigade– and certain extremist elements in the BJP in making India a Hindu nation— these are all worrying signs. These genii must be shoved back into the bottle and buried in the snow-capped Himalayas.
The saving grace is that of the 514 million votes cast, Modi’s party got barely 31 per cent: that is, 69 per cent voted for other parties and other candidates.
It does not include the other 700 million—children, women and men. India’s total population is 1.25 billion—it has quadrupled since independence when it was 400 million.
Significantly in the South and Eastern states of India, the BJP managed to win only seven out of 139 seats.
Among the BJP’s 284 elected MPs, one-third have criminal charges pending against them.
Bollywood is likely to have a field day in making some gangster movies. Both corruption and criminalisation of Indian politics is a terrible narrative within the Indian democracy.
Admittedly one has to acknowledge that Indian elections are a triumph for democracy, particularly when you think of this in the context of India’s neighbours.
Thailand, the only Asian country which was never colonised, has just had its 19th coup.
Fortunately the Indian democracy, after almost 100 years of struggle for freedom, is politically deep-rooted and vibrant although socially and culturally the structures of feudalism, fundamentalism, sectarianism, caste and patriarchy dominate in institutions and the psyche of millions of individuals, including in the universities. One cannot think of a Noam Chomsky, a Salman Rushdie or the late Edward Said on the Indian subcontinent, albeit that India has many brave men and women writing, teaching and intellectually profoundly engaged. But like Gandhi, India’s most original thinker, they get overwhelmed by an ocean of myths.
Modi’s appeal has been that he’ll build ‘more toilets than temples’ and move India from’ bullock carts to bullet trains’. The first of these is a laudable aim as 40 percent of Indians don’t have proper sanitation outlets.
One hopes the Hindu-rate of growth will disappear and a nation, which after almost 70 years of independence, still has 45 per cent malnourished children and an equal number as illiterate, where thousands of peasant farmers commit suicide every year, a leader and his government need to treat these ills on war-footing.
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, (left), shakes hands with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif after the swearing-in ceremony at the Presidential Palace in New Delhi on Monday.
INDIA’S INVADERS
India has been plundered by many invaders and conquerors but none more ruthless than Indians themselves. You do not create 350 million untouchables overnight.
It is the only country where academics and media still categorise citizens of a free nation as schedule castes, other backward castes, tribals, and, of course, the Dalits, previously called the untouchables.
This is done and written without any self-awareness of its profound implications. The red porter on the railway stations is still called a coolie. The most urgent question for Mr Modi and the BJP is to redefine the very idea of being an Indian. Here the BJP’s concept won’t do. In the 19th century no Indian thought himself or herself as an Indian. In the 21st century the question raises its important head, especially after this defining election.
Going back to an imagined glorious past is most inimical to a civil society of such immense potential and talent. The past has its uses but it can also kill the present and deform the future.
It is disturbing to note that the Indian diaspora of North America and Europe is pushing for the Hindutava agenda without realising that in Africa and the Middle East, where there are many millions of Indians, they form minorities.
The way Modi’s government treats minorities in India will have its repercussions outside India for people of Indian descent.
The one enduring achievement of the founding framers of the Indian constitution was to define an Indian citizen. India was very lucky that it had some giant thinkers at the time and perhaps none more remarkable than Pandit Jawarharlal Nehru and Dr Bhim Rao Ambedkar.
Nehru became the PM and Ambedkar the architect of the constitution.
They came from the two extreme ends of the caste hierarchy.
That they should have conceived a nation of such diversity and accommodation so soon after a bloody vivisection of the sub-continent is a tribute to the genius of these men and the exceptional vision embodied therein.
It is salutary to remember that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi and Mohammed Ali Jinnah were both from Gujarat, both lawyers. The destructive seeds of any ugly revolution are within it.
Modi might have been a tea-vendor but he now should become a visionary that his patron saint Swami Vivekananda was– Modi’s icon in this campaign. Vivekananda wanted India to be a ‘manly nation’.
But Vivekananda’s, his original name was Narendra, idea of manliness was not one of muscle and money, or intimidation of minorities or falsification of history and culture.
In fact he was severely critical of pseudo-Hindus who tried to make a way of life and living into a monolithic, exclusive, narrow ideology of an ageless civilisation.
He understood the distinction between transitory power of the politicians and the lasting strength within a people: their resilience and capacity for renewal, regeneration.
Out of which a new, energising and exalted vision is born.
Or as the 17th century Japanese Haiku poet put it:
My house burned down.
Now I can better see
The rising moon.
But the moon also hides its dark side?
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