May 30th, 2004
The general Election 2004 will be remembered for restoring respectability and legitimacy to the word ‘secular’. The sigh of relief of hundreds of millions Indians swept the world like a soothing zephyr. A dread weight has been lifted. The same forces that swept the NeoFascist government of Indira and Sanjay Gandhi from power in 1977 have humbled the fascist RSS in 2004. Who would believe that Indian democracy is not even a century old! Kudos to the people of India.
Where do we go from here?
The first duty of a ruler is to deliver Justice. ‘Justice has to be done and seen to be done’. The perpetrators of the Baburi Masjid outrage and the Gujarat horrors have to be brought to book. Their dodging the process of law should be stopped and the case persecuted on a day to day basis.
For the longer term the problem is to restore a modicum of decency and civilized behaviour as between Hindus Muslims and Sikhs? Riots occur with astonishing regularity to disgrace to India’s much vaunted ‘Five Thousand Years Old Civilization’. The complicity of the administration and especially the police is evident in each such occurrence.
Before the British Raj riots was rare In 1855, the British, through their agents, instigated a riot in Ayodhya in what appears to have been the Act I Scene I of the Babari Masjid Drama. They believed their own propaganda and assumed that the Nawab, Wajid Ali Shah was too engrossed in debauchery to take action. In the event he sent his forces to put the riot down with severity. A Moulvi, Amir Ali was killed in the skirmish and the rioting controlled.
India during its golden periods such as Gupta and Mughal was preferred destination for anyone wanting a share in its abundant material spiritual and intellectual wealth. This did not suit the British agenda and they rewrote the Indian past. The history of India was fractured into Hindu Muslim and British divisions.
The ancient and the medieval periods (Hindu and Muslim) were dismissed as ‘static’ and ‘sterile’. The British period when India was systematically looted ravished and starved into impotence was made out to be the ‘Modern’ period.
British rule in India was monolithic and totalitarian with the iron fist emerging from a none too velvety glove every time Indians asked to be treated with a modicum of dignity and respect. The 190 years (1757-1947) witnessed nearly a hundred famines and over a hundred million deaths from hunger with many more millions suffering malnutrition. 1857/1858 saw the massacre of hundreds of thousands whose villages fell on the route of the vengeful British in their march from the Punjab to Bihar. Before being killed on suspicion of rebellion Hindus were forced to lick cow’s blood and Muslims that of pigs. After death the Muslim corpses were burnt and those of Hindus buried. The Indian mind is still in thrall to fear of the white skin. The RSS hero worship of Adolf Hitler arises out of this complex.
The lasting physical effect of British rule is the high incidence of diabetes and coronary disease in people of Indian origin. The famines saw to it that the fittest died and only those survived who had the ‘thrift’ gene. This gene enables the body to exist on a very low calorie intake. The same gene prevents the body from processing abundance in a healthy manner and causes diabetes and coronary disease when times are better. These facts are not highlighted in our histories and the British continue to teach the Black Hole of Calcutta calumny in their schools.
The History of India as at present taught continues the British tradition of deriving its narrative from hagiographic and bardic sources in which Rajas and Sultans are superhuman heroes fighting for their religion. Indians are mutually antagonistic ‘Hindus’ and ‘Muslims’ who have been at war with each other for seven hundred eight hundred or a thousand years. Hindus are truly Indian while others are aliens interlopers and outsiders. This breeds fascism.
The self styled ‘secular’ forces who constitute the present government need to provide a clean and wholesome secular history of the Indian past. A model has been provided by Romila Thapar in her study of Somanatha.
The past needs to be cleansed of communalism if the future is to be secular.