The other day, when I was thinking of
this whole rigmarole called the Idea of India, one question that had never
occurred to me in the past suddenly bobbed up its inquisitive head in my mind.
Who invented the Idea of India as a Democratic
Republic in the first place?
Taking
a long backward look, the answer became obvious. It was a coterie of eminent
Indians that included Harrow-educated Jawaharlal Nehru and Dt BR Ambedkar, a
Columbia alumnus. It was this league of extraordinary gentlemen who chiseled and
buffed the somewhat alien idea conscientiously
much before it became a reality on 15
August 1947 and 26 January 1950.
Yes.
The leaders of the Indian independence movement were mostly from the Western-educated
middle class. They had been weaned, so to speak, on Socrates and Plato, Marx
and Engels, Gibbon, Darwin, and Spencer, Smith and Keynes, Ruskin and Thoreau and
Shaw among others. Many of these thinkers and writers hailed from Great Britain
of which at the time India was a colony. Imbibing their thoughts, beliefs and
opinions was ironically like being “colonial mimics” http://bit.ly/16Yhi4U of sorts.
But surely it is obvious that there are as many Ideas
of India as there are special interest groups and sub-groups, e.g., big
business, labour, Dalits, OBCs, tribals and so forth. Each group’s Idea of
India is needless to say calibrated to align with its special concerns.
Big business, for instance, would want maximum ROI,
least interference from the government, unlimited access to natural resources
and so forth. Ergo, the big
business’s Idea of India would be a country with a politico-economic system –
whether democratic or not − that treats business, particularly big business,
with kid gloves and so forth.
It’s time we backtracked a bit, though. The founding
fathers’ Idea of India was conceived against the backdrop of Nehru’s Discovery of India, the seminal ideological
text on which the Nehruvian template of a liberal, secular, egalitarian democracy
with a “composite” and inclusive culture and a socialistic economy was based. Nehru
envisioned an Indian nation with the state entrusted with the task of ensuring
that no single special interest group, e.g., the Hindu majority or big
business, enjoyed significant privileges to the detriment of others. One of the
corollaries of this vision was the Indian state taking over the lead role in
the economic sphere.
Unfortunately, this meant the perpetuation of the Ma Baap Sarkar metaphor in the minds of
the illiterate majority − enhanced further by the continuance of feudalistic
behaviour of the bureaucracy, a legacy of the British Raj in any case. Furthermore,
the adoption of another legacy of the British Raj – both Discovery of India and Constitution
of India were written in English and the business of the Indian state continues
to be transacted in English − and the accidental privilege thereby conferred on
the miniscule English-speaking minority of the Indian population who ran the
emerging state enterprises merely confounded the already somewhat cloudy
scenario.
The Idea of India saga seems to have modeled itself on
Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate
Events. The first major crack in the Nehruvian template came with his
daughter’s successive triumphs (Bangladesh, i.e., the splintering of Pakistan, bank nationalization, abolition of privy purses,
stoppage of food imports, a 20-year friendship pact with the USSR) culminating
in the 1974 Pokharan nuclear blast that caught the world’s attention. All this
prompted DK Barooah’s sycophantic “Indira is India, India is Indira” call. JP
Narayan’s challenge to Indira Gandhi’s autocratic rule triggered off the June
1975 declaration of emergency.
The other four significant events in post-Independence
India that progressively sapped the
Nehruvian Idea of India of its relevance were the chronological order of
occurrence the following:
[1] The anti-Sikh violence (1984)
[2] The Shah Bano case (1985)
[3] The Babri Masjid demolition (1992) and its
aftermath (1992-93)
[4] The burning of a train at Godhra and the Gujarat riots
(2002).
Apart from these, there is the on-going virtual
occupation of Jammu and Kashmir and the North East by the Indian Army under the
pretence of keeping peace – a policy without an iota of success in stemming the
insurgency and the defiance of the Indian State. Equally worrying is the seemingly
unstoppable resurgence of the Naxals in the so-called red corridor comprising those
parts of Andhra Pradesh, Bihar, Chhattisgrah, Jharkand, Madhya Prasesh,
Maharashtra, Odisha, Uttar Pradesh and West Bengal inhabited mainly by the marginalized
Adivasi tribals trying to eke a living out of forest produce and primitive
farming under constant threat from forestry officials and the mining
mafia.
Now that NaMo has all but demolished the flag bearers
of the Nehruvian Idea of India, history has finally been consigned to the
dustbin, maybe even to oblivion, where according to the “neo middle class” (a
NaMo hypothesis according to Sunil Khilnani http://bit.ly/1gejUlY) it rightfully belongs.
Will it remain dead and buried for all times to come?
Your guess is as good as mine.
