Sometimes it looks as if we have lost control over our political future. It looks that way to me today (January 31). Perhaps I am unduly depressed by the bandh in Bombay. I certainly regard the entire exercise symptomatic of the death instinct that seems to have seized millions of us. Here we are a poor and overpopulated country with around 40 per cent of our people living below the poverty line paralysing our leading industrial and commercial centre to register our protest against the government’s decision to fix what is patently a reasonable price for the land it wants to acquire for so important a public purpose as the construction of a new port which Bombay desperately needs.
There can, of course, be a difference of opinion on whether the price the authorities have fixed is fair. It can also be argued that it is legitimate for the affected farmers to agitate for a higher price and for opposition parties to support them. But why paralyse life in Bombay and stop thousands of industrial units from contributing to the nation’s well-being?
This is, of course, not the first time Bombay has been so paralysed. Nor, of course, is it the last. Bombay has survived a great deal of madness, including the closure of its textile industry for close to two years, and it can be expected to survive similar outbursts of insanity in the future. But one begins to wonder whether, unknown to us and unseen by us, some malevolent power is dragging us into a disaster of its choice.
More than Bombay, the Akali agitation in Punjab provides evidence that this may indeed be the case. How else can one explain that one of the country’s most modern, progressive, dynamic, hard-working and affluent communities should invent grievances, plunge a state which it dominates into confusion and unleash a reign of terror against fellow citizens whose only crime is that they belong to what may be called the mother religion of India.
Long List Of Myths
It has been, can be and will in fact be said that not all Sikhs are Akalis, that not all Akalis believe in the cult of the knife and that in fact the extremists are a small minority among them. All this may be true. But the agitation could not have been sustained for so long if by and large the Sikh community was not in sympathy with it. Let us not kid ourselves. Self- deception would not lead us anywhere.
We Indians are specialists in building myths. In this case, we have built several. That the Sikhs have genuine grievances which can be redressed. That Mrs. Gandhi is deliberately avoiding an agreement in order to garner the Hindu vote throughout northern India. That the “moderates” among the Akalis can assert themselves against the “extremists” if only they can summon the necessary will. That the back of the agitation can be broken if the government allows the police to go into the gurdwaras, including the holiest of them all, the Golden Temple in Amritsar, and ferret out murderers and other criminals.
The list of the myths we have invented in our innocence and desperation is a long one. In fact the entire discussion on the subject has been dominated by myths. For the truth of the matter is that none of us knows how we can resolve this problem without landing ourselves in worse difficulties.
The Punjab problem has been, can be and will continue to be compared with the one in Assam. So it has been, can be and will be argued that as in the case of Assam, this too will simmer down if only we are patient enough and tactful enough. Perhaps it will. Perhaps the great warriors in Punjab will also tire of it all one day. But does this “hope” not amount to an admission that we are at the end of our tether and that all that we can do is somehow to hold on and wait for fatigue to set in or some miracles to happen? Surely we cannot claim that we are in command.
It would have been frightening enough if we had good reasons to believe that the Akalis alone were seized by some unknown malady. We have no such good reasons. We are all so seized. Witness the bandh in Bombay, or the violence in Uran in Maharashtra and in large parts of Karnataka, or the assassination of a former chief minister of Manipur, or the Maharashtra chief minister’s charge that three of his predecessors all belonging to his own Congress party are engaged in a conspiracy to topple him. Incidentally, all these instances come from one day’s headlines on the front page of this newspaper (January 31). And every day we serve similar fare – unavoidably.
Captain Indecisive
Let us face it, the ship that is India is in serious trouble. If we are lucky, it might drift into some reasonably safe shores. If not, it can get wrecked on its way to nowhere. We do not need to go to history to discover that not all ships make it to port. The so-called third world is a long catalogue of ships which have not made it to port.
It is understandable that the ship should have been subjected to heavy battering: the weather has been pretty awful for years. Indeed, our ship was launched in extremely rough weather and the weather has stayed rough most of the time since. But we the members of the crew too have been negligent of its needs for proper maintenance and repairs. While most of us have not been willing to admit that we are part of the crew, many of us have even been plundering it. The surprise, if any, is that on the whole it still remains sea-worthy.
The captain, too, is experienced, among the most experienced in the world, and very resourceful, certainly without a peer in India. The captain is deeply attached to the ship and the passengers and possesses enormous authority among them as well as the crew. And yet the captain is not able or willing to act decisively.
What has gone wrong? Any number of individuals have described the symptoms – inadequate or incompetent or ineffective advisers, venal and sycophantic courtiers, an atmosphere of insecurity and permissiveness in which the clever and the insincere prosper at the expense of the wise and the dedicated, concentration of too much authority in a few individuals, disruption of the chain of command which the previous captains (Gandhi and Nehru) had so carefully devised, an indifference to the well-being of the passengers. But why all this? No one is quite able to say.
There have, of course, been diagnoses of sorts. The critics have blamed and continue to blame it all on the captain. This is more of a testimony to the “faith” detractors have in the capacity of the captain to set things to rights than a serious analysis.
Some pop (pseudo) psychologists have also spoken of the captain’s unhappy childhood and married life. This apart, psycho-history invariably makes little sense. For not many unhappy children become captains and so-called normalcy produces only mediocrity, never greatness of any kind.
Violence Mounting
The captain has also been accused of nursing dynastic ambitions. First the younger son and now the older one. This may well be so. In our country, family ties remain pretty strong so that every fond parent would do all in his or her power toplace his or her children in good positions. We are new to both democracy and professionalism. But for a dynasty to continue, there must be an estate to rule over. Which is another way of saying that the ship with its support system must be in good shape.
Some have talked of the inadequacy of the ship’s geometry (parliamentary democracy) and the need for changing over to a new one (a presidential system with enormous powers vested in the chief executive as in France); others have spoken equally sweepingly of the collapse of the moral order which is supposed to have sustained the community now called India through several millennia; still others have been casually referring to the winds of change sweeping the world, often not caring to define where these winds are pushing us and how we can direct them to take us where we would like to go.
Such debates are welcome and should go on. Hopefully, they would prevent too much steam accumulating and exploding in our face; they might even produce some workable solution one day. But right now, the prospect is gloomy. We are behaving as if we are mortally afraid of moving into the 21st century and are, therefore, raising very possible obstacle in our path. Backwardness has many cunning ways of perpetuating itself. Violence is certainly one of them. And we are among the most violent countries in the world today.
In a different age, political uncertainty need not have been a cause for too much concern. But in our age it is. Politics is truly in command, whether we like it or not. Not always in the crude Maoist sense, but in command all the same. It holds the key to the future in every other respect.
The Times of India, 1 February 1984