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archive: Batting for India

Batting for India

Swapan Dasgupta
India Today
July 19, 1999


    Title: Batting for India 
    Author: Swapan Dasgupta
    Publication: India Today
    Date: July 19, 1999 
    
    For India, it's been an exhilarating six weeks.  There was a war in
    the barren and inhospitable climes of Kargil.  The army fought that
    one valiantly and victoriously.  The government chipped in with a
    diplomatic offensive that conclusively nailed the lie that
    post-Pokhran India was more isolated than ever before.  But there was
    another battle being fought in the cities and villages-a battle to
    re-embrace Indian nationhood.
    
    The significance of this emotional churning shouldn't be
    underestimated.  For the past few years, cosmopolitan intellectuals,
    leftists and gung-ho free-marketers have inundated impressionable
    minds with the belief that India is just a geographical term, bereft
    of emotional relevance-except during cricket matches.  These upholders
    of global networking heaped contempt on the tinsel patriotism of A.R.
    Rahman's Vande Mataram and Border and Sarfarosh.  They seceded from
    India to take up causes like Narmada and disarmament, causes that are
    rooted in western fashion.
    
    Now, they will have to think again.  The national awakening over
    Kargil wasn't contrived or orchestrated.  It was real, spontaneous and
    touched every corner of India.  From the bride in Orissa who donated
    her wedding jewels to the Congress MP who donated satellite phones so
    that soldiers could call home, the popular response to the war effort
    was overwhelming.  Those who contributed hadn't ever seen Kargil.  Nor
    are they likely to ever visit it.  Yet, Tiger Hill and Mashkoh Valley
    became as much a symbol of India as India Gate.  Call it nationalism,
    call it xenophobia, call it whatever you want, but the Kargil war
    demonstrated that India lives in the soul of Indians.  Quite
    unwittingly, Mian Nawaz Sharif helped restore India to its people.
    
    He did more than that.  In forcing India into a war we never wanted,
    Sharif forced us to choose between nationhood and a spurious
    cosmopolitanism.  Regardless of voting intentions, most Indians waved
    the flag vigorously.  But some stayed curiously silent or spent their
    time in an insidious game of de-moralisation.  Didn't it strike you as
    curious that the NGOS who are the biggest recipients of foreign
    funding for so-called "development" were hardly to be seen or heard
    during the past six weeks?  Why weren't their elaborate networks-so
    assiduously mobilised in protesting against the Pokhran tests last
    year-put to use in the war effort?
    
    Where were groups like Sahmat that were so incredibly active in
    raising money for Cuba and promoting Pakistani artistes in Delhi? 
    What can be said about CPI(M) politburo's Biman Bose who says jingoism
    got its just desserts from the Chinese in 1962?  Or the CPI(M) Rajya
    Sabha member Ashok Mitra who in a newspaper column last week described
    the Indian troops in Kashmir as an "army of occupation"?  Booker prize
    winner Arundhati Roy was photographed dishing out a note to a beggar. 
    Strange we never saw her signing a cheque for the National Defence
    Fund?  Weren't the jawans fighting for her country too?
    
    India is an easy-going, sab chalta hai country that makes way for all
    sorts of views.  It will continue to remain that way once the guns
    become silent and diplomacy takes over conflict resolution.  Yet, when
    normal life resumes and our gaze reverts to the swings and splits of
    electoral politics, it is important to remember the weeks of
    Kargil-those who batted for India and those who preferred to be
    superior and look the other way.
    



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