Author: Premen Addy
Publication:
Date:
India at present may be a moral
maze of colliding barbarisms but British media corridors have converged
on the single source of Hindu Indian guilt. If BBC led the charge, the
lower circulation broadsheets, such as the Independent and Guardian, have
shown no lack of enthusiasm in operating the batteries.
The Godhra tragedy in which a Muslim
mob in a premeditated assault set a stationary train alight and incinerated
58 Hindu passengers, including women and children, was diluted of its horror
with repeated doses of bromide - the victims were "Hindu activists", "militants",
or "fundamentalists", therefore, in other words, they had it coming. In
the many base legends of the Holocaust denial, it is put about that the
Jews brought about their own fate because they were moneylenders and rapacious
landlords.
Propaganda justifying murder and
oppression has its endless permutations, yet the dissembling theme remains
unchanged. One would have thought that atheists, agnostics, believers,
apostates and others that defy or transcend all comprehensible categories
of mind have a right to travel as they have to think freely and speak without
fear. As long as they do not infringe on the freedom of their fellow citizens
and threaten them with death or injury their activities surely fall within
the ambit of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.
Mr Peter Popham, of the Independent,
long beset by an incontinent hatred for India, pronounced that the country
represented a brand of "quixotic fascism" bred in "an immature democracy".
Poor Mr Popham. If the truth be told, his posting in Delhi among multitudes
of the lesser breeds beyond the law must be condign punishment for sins
in a previous incarnation. In a front-page report on June 3, 1999, in the
midst of an acute provincial water shortage, he foretold, with carnivorous
relish, the coming famine in impoverished Gujarat, pouring vitriolic scorn
on any notion of economic progress in post-Raj India. In a subsequent piece,
he was equally dismissive of India's capacity to enter the fraternity of
manufacturing nations, there being some unstated genetic disorder that
had disabled the Indian intellect.
The Independent's Oriental columnist,
Ms Yasmin Alibhai Brown, said it was wrong to have killed the 58 Hindus
at Godhra but her rectitude assumed a Pecksniffian dimension when she pointed
stonily to the Hindu fundamentalism of the dead. Was it then a bolt of
lightening from on high that had struck them down? In virtuous overflow,
Ms Alibhai Brown told how, in the absence of her cigar-smoking liberal
father, she, a Shia Muslim, had asked Lord Bhikku Parekh, a fellow Gujarati
but a Hindu, to give her away as a bride to her English husband. The Hindu
Professor Higgins (Lord Parekh heads the chair of political theory at the
University of Hull) thus played a critical role in the nuptials of the
Muslim Eliza Doolittle. None of the high drama of Romeo and Juliet, but
a pretty story none the less.
But Ms Alibhai Brown had to ruin
it all by enjoining us to remain true to the spirit of her two secular
saints, Gandhiji and Jinnah. The equation bordered on insanity. Only those
suffering from memory loss would have forgotten Jinnah's Direct Action
Day call on August 16, 1946, which led to the organised massacre of 12,000
Hindus in Calcutta and presided over by his Muslim League lieutenant, the
Bengal chief minister H. S. Suhrawardy.
It was a pogrom that opened the
gates to the subsequent Subcontinental holocaust. None of Jinnah's later
secularist pieties can diminish his role as the Subcontinent's Dracula,
just as Zulfikar Ali Bhutto's socialist twaddle cannot camouflage his part
as an apostle of anti-Indian hatred. He was Pakistan's Duce who, like the
Italian original, met a sticky end.
Those who cherish history by remaining
true to its records will find it impossible to subscribe to the Alibhai
Brown-BBC legend of the secular and tolerant Jinnah. He did more than any
other figure to introduce the lethal cocktail of religion and politics
into India's national life and Pakistan today is his truest monument.
BBC Television represented a harrowing
picture of Gujarati Muslims now refugees in their own land, yet it has
never made even passing mention of the 300,000 Hindu Kashmiri Pandits who
have been similarly dispossessed of hearth and home and whose bereavements
have also blighted their lives.
The famed Corporation was noticeably
sceptical of the Indian Government's accusation of a Pakistan ISI hand
in the hijacking of the Indian Airlines flight from Kathmandu in late December
1999, but this has not prevented its World Affairs Editor, Mr John Simpson,
a man of goodly girth and ego, from suggesting slyly that if India had
not exchanged Omar Sheikh for the hostages held in Taliban-controlled Kandahar,
Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street journalist abducted and beheaded by Sheikh
and his Pakistani accomplices, would be alive today.
Hear no evil, speak no evil, was
BBC's policy on the Taliban-Islamabad nexus prior to September 11. After
that fateful day, Truth was transmogrified from abstraction into settled
fact. Alas, that was never the case with the Mumbai bomb blasts of March
1993, which were non-events, while the Indian response to the December
13 terrorist attack on Parliament was a ploy to win the Uttar Pradesh State
elections for the ruling BJP.
To set the canvas straight is not
to condone or diminish in any way the barbarities perpetrated on thousands
of innocent Muslims in Gujarat. The uneducated vanity of a Peter Popham
does not have to be a spur to a civilised conscience. The revenge of the
barbarian is the stuff of barbarism. Monsters such as Tamerlane and Nadir
Shah used revenge as a pretext for the wholesale slaughter of the defenceless.
The Vishwa Hindu Parishad and its
Bajrang affiliate are situated largely in the benighted northern Gangetic
plain, where no modern science and technology has penetrated. What commonly
passes as Hindu fundamentalism is, in the absence of church and theology,
the expression of an overheated, toxic chauvinism in osmosis with criminal,
self-centred idiocy.
No temple or act of worship in Ayodhya
or anywhere else can exceed the sanctity of the mansion that is India.
An India true to itself and to the best of its past will forever be democratic,
diverse, concerned and forgiving. The efforts of her finest sons and daughters
will bring her strength and prosperity. That at least must be our hope
and prayer.
But there are truths to be faced
and lessons to be learned. Indian nationalism, like other nationalisms,
carries its baggage of myths tailored to the political demands of the moment.
To counter the increasing power of Islamic separatism and keep India united
a nirvana of Hindu-Muslim brotherhood down the ages was invented and a
halo created for the country's Mughal rulers.
Consider Rammohan Roy's invocation:
"I now conclude my Essay by offering up thanks to the Supreme Disposer
of the events of the Universe, for having unexpectedly delivered this country
from the long-continued tyranny of our former rulers, and placed it under
the government of the English..."
Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Iswar
Chandra Vidyasagar, Ranade and other leading voices of the new India kept
aloof from the 1857 Mutiny which they perceived as the death agony of the
old order and not the First War of Independence of nationalist and Communist
legend.
The historian R. C. Majumdar put
this legend to rest in a work of magisterial scholarship in 1961. The Congress
support for the reactionary Khilafat movement was a grievous error of judgement,
a truth that is now generally accepted.
Finally, the verbiage of anti-colonialism
has obscured the role of British and European Indologists in bringing to
the attention of the world and to new generations of Indians, India's classical
past.
When some of the great works of
Sanskrit literature, including the Gita, were translated into English with
the help and encouragement from Warren Hastings, he himself made this ringing
pronouncement: "These will survive when the British dominion in India shall
have long ceased to exist, and when the sources which it once yielded of
wealth and power are lost to remembrance."
And was it not Mahatma Gandhi who
said: "It is a matter of the greatest pleasure to me to state that it (the
Congress) was first conceived in an English brain: Allan Octavian Hume
we know as the father of the Congress". And did not Gandhiji acknowledge:
"We would have been nowhere, if there had been no Congress".
If the Hindu-Muslim dialogue is
to achieve true trust and understanding it has to be predicated on the
issues that have divided the two communities rather on a contrived hostility
towards a third party - the British. Civilisations will have to redefine
themselves and their relationships with each other in the light of contemporary
needs and challenges.
Political short-cuts are the prescriptions
of demagogues who beguile, inebriate and ultimately destroy their flocks.
If the Hindu-Muslim dialogue is to produce creative results there has to
be deep soul-searching and introspection. Then will come the enlightenment
to end the karma of communal conflict.
(The author, a visiting tutor in
Modern Asian History at Kellog College, Oxford, is editor of the London-based
India Weekly.)
