Author: Swapan Dasgupta
Publication: India Today
(Web Edition)
Date: September 11,
2000
URL: http://www.india-today.com/webexclusive/columns/swapan/20000911.html
British writer Malcolm
Muggeridge once described the cover of Time magazine as "post-Christendom's
most notable stained glass window". Had he been alive this millennium,
I wonder what he would have said about the New York Review of Books (NYRB)?
The definitive icon of a putrid liberal establishment?
The question is not academic.
In the week that Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee began his somnolent
13-day visit to the US, the NYRB commemorated the event with the first
of a three-part tome on Kashmir which, in case you are only familiar with
the winter wear, "is ruled by India". Mind you, not "in India" but
"ruled by India" just as South Africa was once "ruled by" whites.
Written by Pankaj Mishra---a fixture of the incestuous literary world of
India---the first part of "Death in Kashmir" is a lengthy account of a
visit to Srinagar and Chitisingpura, the village where 35 Sikhs were massacred
in cold blood on March 20 this year, the day President Bill Clinton began
his tour of India. The massacre was blamed by the Indian Government
on the jehadis from across the border.
That can't be true, says
Mishra, because militant organisations like the Laskar-e-Toiba that take
pride in their military successes in Kashmir, denied any involvement and
condemned the killings. So who killed the Sikhs? Since truth must
be an unquestioned virtue of all holy warriors, Mishra is first puzzled
and then stumbles upon the truth. "The Indian failure to identify
or arrest even a single person connected to the killings or the killers,
and the hastiness and brutality of the Indian attempt to stick the blame
on 'foreign mercenaries' while Clinton was still in India, only lends weight
to the new and growing suspicion among Sikhs that the massacre in Chitisinghpura
was organised by Indian intelligence agencies in order to influence Clinton,
and the large contingent of influential American journalists accompanying
him, into taking a much more sympathetic view of India as a helpless victim
of Islamic terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan: a view of India that
some very hectic Indian diplomacy in the West had previously failed to
achieve."
Does Mishra know something
that we, in the Indian media, have missed? Not surprising, because, as
Mishra is quick to point out, the Indian media suffers from "blinkered
nationalism". According to him, "the media, slicker but also coarse,
after 10 years of economic liberalisation, had brought about a general
intoxication with war in millions of middle-class homes". Therefore,
it is more than likely that this tribe of hard drinking xenophobes were
completely clueless of the "growing suspicion among Sikhs" that the Chitisingpura
killings were a pre-meditated self-goal organised by a frustrated army
and sinister diplomatists. But how come it escaped the notice of
all the glittering notables who have made self-flagellation into a social
statement? India's skills at self-delusion must be pretty wonderful.
After all, we never questioned Pakistan's hand in the Kandahar hijack,
the bombing of churches in South India, the Lucknow-Kathmandu spy ring?
Not only are we lazy and gullible for not probing further, we must be plain
stupid.
So stupid that we can't,
unlike Mishra, gleam the incontrovertible logic of involving Pakistan in
a tripartite dialogue on Kashmir. So stupid that we can't detect
the awesome dangers of America's increasing pro-India tilt at a time when
Delhi has a Government led by 'Hindu nationalists': it "ends up undermining
the already fragile safeguards for civil liberties in India's imperfect
democracy".
So that's what it's all
about. Mishra's gripe is not really directed at our 'blinkered nationalism';
it's aimed at the 'blinkered' commercialism of all those in his side of
the Atlantic who believe India has transcended from a land of snake charmers
to a land of computer geeks. It's a policy prescription of those
who can't stomach the ease with which India manages to blend nationalism
and technology. So Kashmir becomes a wonderful handle to beat India
with. If necessary by fabricating impressions.
Two years ago, for example,
India's Booker and Narmada wonder wrote about the possibility of the dreaded
Hindu nationalists mounting tax raids on those who are opposed to nuclear
weapons. No such raids have taken place---even if they have, our
'blinkered nationalists' in the media wouldn't be caught dead writing about
them. But I read John Keat's voluminous History of India and behold,
the tax raids moved from the realms of possibility to fact. Lies
have a tendency to reproduce effortlessly, especially after being blessed
by the NYRB's formidable liberal authority.
The likes of Mishra are
charming, witty and wonderful to have dinner with. They have imbibed
the cosmopolitanism of the US with finesse. They have also put India
on the map of Manhattan, unlike the blinkered nationalists who flock to
the Silicon Valley. They are a bit like Wilfred Blunt, the affable
late-19th century anti-establishment poseur who founded the Cribbet---a
dining club in Oxford. Blunt was a great friend of George Nathaniel
Curzon, the high Tory who became Viceroy of India and foreign secretary
of Britain. Curzon was amused by him. "My dear Wilfred," he
wrote to his friend, "your poetry is delightful and your morals, though
deplorable, enchanting. But why are you a traitor to your country?"
Because it is profitable to be so.
(Swapan Dasgupta is Deputy
Editor, INDIA TODAY. He has edited Nirad Chaudhuri, The
First Hundred Years.)
