India and Petty Ideas

[Logic note]

M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist: The Insecurity of Petty Ideas

The Insecurity of Petty Ideas
The Insecurity of Petty Ideas
by M J Akbar

The times have changed. Patriotism used to be the last refuge of the scoundrel. The scoundrel is now the last refuge of patriotism. This is not because the cad and the poseur have filled up, but because we are busy chopping democracy up into little pocket-sized units of petty patriotism. Culture, economics and the history of the last hundred years unite us. The greed for votes is beginning to divide us. It is one thing for municipal-level politicians to try and survive by wooing the lowest common denominator. But when politicians of some stature, a Cabinet Minister hoping to rise to Prime Minister, or a Chief Minister begins to parrot the pidgin politics of parochialism, then it is time to address the infection with a scalpel. Regional separatism is the sore that can deteriorate into secessionist cancer if not addressed in time.

The idealism of India was always vulnerable to a challenge from smaller ideas. It is more comforting, particularly at moments of stress, to snuggle into a nest. That is the first option of the insecure. When the insecure become aggressive, they find pseudo-strength in hysteria.

India is a democracy with a fundamental commitment to free speech. The intelligent hysteric has learnt to dress a lie in the robes of morality. Morality makes it fashionable to a self-congratulatory elite.

A familiar charge, voiced recently by a Kashmiri secessionist ensconced in Delhi’s academia, is that India is a fascist state. This is precisely the sort of thing that sounds suitably liberal in seminar rooms and doubtless envelops the audience in the warm glow of self-satisfaction. There: how brave of us! We have given shelter to the oppressed!

The obvious irony, of course, is that in a genuinely fascist state, the great orator would be locked up — and the key thrown away — before he could have uttered the first letter of “fascist”. A dissident has a right to the liberalism of Indian democracy, academia and mainstream media. But the fact that even secessionists, sometimes thinly disguised in parallel demands, enjoy the benefits of a generous culture is proof of India’s liberal polity. After all, the most egregious instance of provocation in recent years has been the manner in which some demonstrators flaunted the Pakistan flag in pursuit of their political demands. I wonder if anyone in Pakistan would have been allowed to carry the Indian flag during a demonstration.

Freedom and independence are neither the same thing, nor interchangeable. The great age of European colonialism is over; every nation can claim to be independent. That does not necessarily mean that it is free. Freedom is not merely release from some magic cage Europe constructed to fetter distant lands. Freedom is a principle that the state shares with every citizen. India is both independent and free.

A nation can be colonised by its own elites, perhaps more easily than by foreign ones. A purist political scientist might debate this definition of such “colonisation”; after all a dictatorship can be as nationalist in its objectives as a democratic one. But the spirit of oppression that pervades through a dictatorship or an oppressive oligarchy is not all that distant from the ethos of colonial rule. The British Raj was not a continuous exercise in brutality. In many instances it was liberal and reformist. Many unbiased critics would certainly compare it favourably to the feudalism that prevailed in much of India during British rule. Not every feudal was a despot, but many were; many more were simply irresponsible and self-indulgent. It was only when they had to defend the right of the British to rule an alien land did the splendidly adorned Viceroys and plum-voiced Oxbridge civil servants descended to ruthlessness. If the lathi did not silence India’s voice, the bayonet would. If that did not suffice, the guns appeared.

Paradoxically, it can be easier to defend a fascist state than a democracy. The former does not offer habeas corpus [“Show us the body”] through which courts can limit the power of the executive. In a country not too far away, thousands have been picked up and thrown into jail before they are cherry picked for transportation to a foreign prison where they can be punished for real or imagined terrorism. Intelligence agencies run an alternative power structure in the name of security, designed to intimidate their own countrymen, backed up by their own foreign policy.

But because a democracy like India has a soft, even pulpy interior, it would be a fallacy to believe that it will necessarily be weak in the defence of its national integrity. India may have more political parties than it has voters, and the struggle for office may be laced with passions that ignite personal vendettas, but when it comes to security of the state differences melt and all parties close ranks.

The state is not sectarian. Some Kashmiris might be advertising a long list of complaints but they should check with Khalistanis in Punjab or Nagas in the Northeast. Their list might be longer. The great healing power of democracy lies in a simple fact: the door is never closed. Yesterday’s secessionists are today’s Chief Ministers in the Northeast. The Akalis passed the Anandpur Sahib Resolution in the 1980s; who remembers the resolution now?

Anger is not the prerogative of the secessionist alone. There is a perceptible rage brewing among Indians who believe in India, and cannot understand why those Kashmiris who agitate for separation in the valley should have no qualms about taking full advantage of academic institutions and business opportunities in the rest of India. There is a growing view that the achievements of India, political, academic and economic, should be reserved for those who believe in India, and not extended to those who wanted to subvert it.

There is logic in this view. And yet it hurts the spirit of the very Constitution we seek to protect. It is useful to add a warning. Compromise with principles is the first step on that slippery road towards abandonment. An hour of crisis, such as we face today, demands that we rise above our anger to preserve the values of our founding generation, who gave us our Constitution. The worst of times calls out for the best in us.

(In Covert: Subscribe Covert)

Posted by M.J. Akbar's Blog: Presented by ilaxi at 17:45 0 comments

 

[Logic note]

M.J. Akbar - Author and Veteran Journalist: The economic partition that still grounds us

The economic partition that still grounds us
The economic partition that still grounds us
By M J Akbar

Imagine, if you will, a nation unborn; the map of the Indian subconscious had the Indian subcontinent not been subdivided in 1947 and 1971.

Pakistan and Bangladesh are facts. It is idiocy to sneer at them as failed states. You have to look at facts without the sticky impediment of sentiment. After much consideration, with cold evidence in front of me, I am pleased to announce a personal somersault. After years of examining the validity, or otherwise, of the seeds that nurtured the idea of Pakistan, I am now relieved that it came into existence. Who would ever have believed what Pakistan has grown up into, if it had never been born at all?

Who could have convinced two generations of post-1947 Indian Muslims that Pakistan was not the heaven that had dominated its advertising before Partition? Six decades later, every Muslim of the subcontinent knows that suicide bombs and Kalashnikovs can extract a daily diet of death even in a country where there is no Hindu to call an enemy. Facts are the coolest needles to puncture fevered fantasy.

Pakistan was only ever a very partial answer to what the British called the “Muslim question”. By 1971, with the emergence of Bangladesh, the partial became twice partitioned. 1971 also proved that the slogan that created Pakistan, “Islam in danger!”, was a concoction designed to serve politicians, and not save the faith. As Maulana Azad repeatedly emphasized, even when the winds were against him, Islam is a brotherhood, not a ‘nationhood’. If Islam were sufficient to create a modern nation state, the Arabs would not be divided into 22 countries. They even have a language in common.

Indian Muslims now know that Pakistan has bounced in and out of army rule, to land, today, in a quagmire that might have neither the freedom of democracy nor the frigid certainty of dictatorship. Fatima Bhutto, Benazir’s niece, does have a grudge against uncle Asif Zardari; she believes her father Murtaza, was shot dead in a family power struggle. But the opening sentence of her recent piece in the New Statesman (October 30) is startling enough to demand attention.


Pakistan’s newly elected government, she writes, is “the first in the world headed by two former convicts (between them the President and the Prime Minister have served time on charges of corruption, narcotics, extortion and murder, no less...”

A state may not fail, but a profligate government can teeter on the edge of bankruptcy. Pakistan’s desperation for a bailout loan is not news. What deserves a headline is that its closest allies, including China and Saudi Arabia, have had enough of the loan-bowl. Zardari cobbled together something called “Friends of Pakistan” only to discover that friendship doesn’t fetch dollars. The top priority of its ambassador in Washington, Hussain Haqqani, is to plead for $10 billion as reward for participation in America’s “war on terror”.

Individuals have always been mercenaries; this could be a case of a whole army being parlayed for cash. The Pentagon audits the money Pakistan gets for military operations. If the Pakistan army is fighting on the Afghan border in defence of its national interest, why would it send a bill to Washington?

The leadership of a nation forged out of millions of dreams seems to have lost its sense of nationalism. Paradoxically, the sense of a great national destiny would have flourished if the nation had been denied an existence.

But the discomforts of Pakistan are of little comfort to Indian Muslims. They are convinced now that 1947 was a mirage; but there is too much fog between them and the next horizon. The principles of the Indian Constitution, sustained by democracy and secularism, are the ideal commitments for any group that considers itself disadvantaged. But neither democracy nor secularism is an industry offering jobs. Economics has flattened the world into a racetrack, and not every community is in the race.

1947 was a geographical and political partition, a screaming laceration through the heart. Since then we have had a silent partition: the economic partition of India. The educated middle classes and the rich are rising with rising India; the rest are stagnant.

This was not conceived on communal lines and yet, as the dice has rolled, it involves communities, whether tribals or Dalits or Muslims. The Sachar Commission report is a snapshot portrait of the utter neglect that Muslims have suffered under largely Congress governments. Check with the community and the grievance is unequivocal: others get reservations, we get enquiry commissions. The Congress mantra for Muslims, its favourite vote bank, has been a single emotion, fear: after us, the deluge. If you don’t keep us in power, saffron will strangle you. It works, but only up to a point.

As the clichés on dozens of book covers suggest: the Indian elephant has lumbered towards take-off, the tiger has launched its spring. The India of yesterday’s imagination is turning slowly, untidily into a reality, hiccups notwithstanding. But does every Indian deserve the privilege of imagination, or it is reserved only for those who emerged from the womb of luck?

Posted by M.J. Akbar's Blog: Presented by ilaxi at 16:53

 

[DarkStar]

This petty idea has spent the past 60 years, looking the bigger ROI in the eye, and not giving an inch even after half of its territory was lost.

lol. The Lahore Badshahs, such Petty sons of this petty idea, beat each and every Bhaarati team in the recent ICL final.

People thought David was small, and petty. But do you know how Goliath fell?

 

[Logic note]

This petty idea has spent the past 60 years, looking the bigger ROI in the eye, and not giving an inch even after half of its territory was lost.

lol. The Lahore Badshahs, such Petty sons of this petty idea, beat each and every Bhaarati team in the recent ICL final.

People thought David was small, and petty. But do you know how Goliath fell?

I can only smile on this argument and proves that idea was petty .

 

[DarkStar]

the only thing petty, were the attitudes of the majority of HIndus that led muslims into thinking we needed to seperate. What was petty was that after years of sucking up to the muslim rulers, as soon as the British came muslims were classifed as 'maleech' and ended up as being third class citizens, who cannot eat, drink, walk in the vicinity of Brahmans and even those of lower castes.

What was petty was gandhi ji, nehru ji, patel ji's assertions that they could ignore the views of teh muslim league and the muslim voice, not make them part of the consultative process, and force them into making a very difficult decision.

Read rajmohan gandhi's book, and he will tell you how the 'petty' Jinnah, sent letters upon letters to his grandfather (upto the early 40's) in order to reach some rapprochement and begged him to accomodate the league in his plans, but to no avail.

Their arrogance led to the partition, as the arrogance of people like you continues the status quo.

 

[Flintlock]

This petty idea has spent the past 60 years, looking the bigger ROI in the eye, and not giving an inch even after half of its territory was lost.

lol. The Lahore Badshahs, such Petty sons of this petty idea, beat each and every Bhaarati team in the recent ICL final.

People thought David was small, and petty. But do you know how Goliath fell?

Erm, I don't consider Pakistan "petty" or anything, but your post is kinda self-defeating.
"Not giving an inch after half its territory was lost" - hello! I think that half your territory is more than an inch!

Also, the example of ICL is rather strange - considering that the reason the Badshahs won is not because of the greatness of Pakistani cricket - since the very reason why the Badshah team is so strong is because half the Pakistani players defected from the national team!

Remember, when we talk of the Pakistani country- we are referring to it as an institution, and not as a people or a race. A weak Pakistani nation does not imply that its inhabitants are any less capable than their counterparts across the border.

So the fact that Pakistani players are succeeding in the ICL isn't something Pakistan Cricket Board should be proud of - rather it should be concerned that all its talent is fleeing abroad.

The success of a nation is also measure by the amount of talent it can attract to its shores. The US for example, thrives on imported talent. Not because the Americans are dumb, but because the Americans are smart enough to build the kind of institutions which will attract foreign talent.

 

[Flintlock]

the only thing petty, were the attitudes of the majority of HIndus that led muslims into thinking we needed to seperate. What was petty was that after years of sucking up to the muslim rulers, as soon as the British came muslims were classifed as 'maleech' and ended up as being third class citizens, who cannot eat, drink, walk in the vicinity of Brahmans and even those of lower castes.

What was petty was gandhi ji, nehru ji, patel ji's assertions that they could ignore the views of teh muslim league and the muslim voice, not make them part of the consultative process, and force them into making a very difficult decision.

Read rajmohan gandhi's book, and he will tell you how the 'petty' Jinnah, sent letters upon letters to his grandfather (upto the early 40's) in order to reach some rapprochement and begged him to accomodate the league in his plans, but to no avail.

Their arrogance led to the partition, as the arrogance of people like you continues the status quo.

Sigh - we really need a resident historian who can represent the Indian point of view.

Anyone willing to take up the mantle?

Unfortunately I am not very informed about pre-partition politics.

 

[DarkStar]

Sigh - we really need a resident historian who can represent the Indian point of view.

Anyone willing to take up the mantle?

Unfortunately I am not very informed about pre-partition politics.

don't need a historian. just go to amazon.com and order Rajmohan Gandhi's book, "Understanding the Muslim Mind". He covers this quite extensively. You might have to spend a few bucks, but it would be money well spent.

 

[Flintlock]

don't need a historian. just go to amazon.com and order Rajmohan Gandhi's book, "Understanding the Muslim Mind". He covers this quite extensively. You might have to spend a few bucks, but it would be money well spent.

No thanks darkstar - my interests are limited to ancient history.

In any case, I don't particularly enjoy debating with you. Your posts are often rude and derogatory. It takes away the joy and replaces it with a desire to "get back" at you, which kinda ruins the quality of my posts as well.

 

[Vinod2070]

Well, I will say that "taali ek haath se nahi bajati". It takes two to tango.

If "blame" is to be apportioned for partition, it will be on both sides.

Perhaps Congress leaders did not take Mr. Jinnah seriously enough because Congress in their mind represented every community and they did not like the idea of each community being exclusively represented by its own leaders. They did not think that that is how a modern nation could work.

Again Nehru was highly impressed with the USSR and its great successes (as it seemed to him in those days.). He wanted India to have a strong central government with strong central planning (5 year plans were a USSR thing). He wanted India to make the leap to scientific advancement and was a strong believer in secularism and separation of state and faith.

Jinnah advocated a weak center and strong states. His ideas were more to ensure that minorities were always represented and no decisions of any import could be taken without their concurrence.

Frankly if we can muster enough neutrality (which admittedly is tough), Pakistan was a product of circumstances and may be some strong personalities.

And may be it was good that the partition happened. Else the civil unrest could potentially be much higher in the united India and may be most of our energies would go towards managing that.

 

[Goodperson]

This petty idea has spent the past 60 years, looking the bigger ROI in the eye, and not giving an inch even after half of its territory was lost.

lol. The Lahore Badshahs, such Petty sons of this petty idea, beat each and every Bhaarati team in the recent ICL final.

People thought David was small, and petty. But do you know how Goliath fell?

The comparison with ICL was lame, ICL does not have much audience in India.

 

[DarkStar]

No thanks darkstar - my interests are limited to ancient history.

In any case, I don't particularly enjoy debating with you. Your posts are often rude and derogatory. It takes away the joy and replaces it with a desire to "get back" at you, which kinda ruins the quality of my posts as well.

I see you don't. AS for quality of posts, i've been here a couple of months now, and I dare say I have hardly seen much quality from yours, whether i am involved in that thread or not.

Whatever answers I've received from you can be characterised as less than satisfactory, to say the least.

Good way to run away from the points i've made though. You're definitely an expert in that.

 

[DarkStar]

The comparison with ICL was lame, ICL does not have much audience in India.

It was said tongue in cheeck, or didn't you notice the lol before the sentence?

You're lucky I didn't say more about the article posted by logic. It showed a condescending attitude and derogatory intent.

 

[Flintlock]

I see you don't. AS for quality of posts, i've been here a couple of months now, and I dare say I have hardly seen much quality from yours, whether i am involved in that thread or not.

Whatever answers I've received from you can be characterised as less than satisfactory, to say the least.

Good way to run away from the points i've made though. You're definitely an expert in that.

Erm...rest assured that I have the exact same opinion about your posts.

If I wanted to run away from your posts, I could have simply ignored them.

 

[Vinod2070]

No thanks darkstar - my interests are limited to ancient history.

In any case, I don't particularly enjoy debating with you. Your posts are often rude and derogatory. It takes away the joy and replaces it with a desire to "get back" at you, which kinda ruins the quality of my posts as well.

Mere muh ki baat chhin li.