Comment
by
tamilnation.org
-
Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh is right to point out that divisions are on the rise in India.
He is also right to say that this is not an accident. But
Mr. Manmohan Singh
is wrong when he attributes the cause to evil forces conspiring to assault the
'composite culture' of India - a 'composite culture' created by English
speaking Indians speaking to one another in English. Mr. Manmohan Singh
flies in the face of
history when he declares -
"Ethnic and religious communities have lived together
peacefully during the past millennium. We take pride in the fact that
people of all castes, communities, religions and languages live together
peacefully, and our culture imbibes the best from each one of them."
It was after all the divisions in India which enabled the
foreign invaders to conquer and rule India. Mr.Manmohan Singh may gain by
revisiting the words of
Sardar K.M.Pannikar, Indian Ambassador to China from 1948 to 1952, and later Vice
Chancellor, Mysore University in
Principles and Practice of Diplomacy, 1956
-
"The Rajah of Cochin who in his resentment against the Zamorin
permitted the Portuguese to establish a trading station in his territories
could not foresee that thereby he had introduced into India something which
was to alter the course of history."
And for centuries India has been notorious for its
caste divisions and caste murders.
"I’d say the biggest indictment of all
is that we are still a country, a culture, a society which continues
to nurture and practice the notion of untouchability. While our
economists number-crunch and boast about the growth rate, a million
people — human scavengers — earn their living carrying several kilos
of other people’s shit on their heads every day. And if they didn’t
carry shit on their heads they would starve to death. Some f***ing
superpower this."
Arundhati Roy
in conversation with Shoma Chaudhury, March 2007
Mr. Manmohan Singh may also
find that which Pramatha Chauduri wrote in Bengali
in 1921 instructive -
".. No people in Europe are as different, one from another,
as our people. There is not that much difference between England and Holland as there
is between Madras and Bengal. Even France and Germany are not that far apart.....
As children, we read in the Hitopodesa that at night birds from all directions would
gather on a shimul tree on the banks of the Godavari. Why? To cackle for a while and then
go off to sleep. Cackle in this context means to discuss the politics of the birdworld. We, too, in this dark, night time of India's history go to the Congress meet to
cackle for three or four days and then snore. We can cackle together because, thanks to
the education conferred by the British, we all have the same dialect. I am not saying that
this dialect is all that our lips utter or our minds. All I want to suggest is that behind
the Congress patriotism, there is only one kind of mind and that mind is bred on English
text books. We all have that kind of mind, but under it is the mind which is individual
for all nations and different from nation to nation. And our civilisation will emerge from
the depth of that mind."
Today more than 80 years after Pramatha Chauduri, we may have an
Indian 'state' but we do not have an Indian 'nation'. A state is an institution.
A nation is a togetherness - a
togetherness of a
people who speak a common language and who trace their heritage to a common origin. In truth, that which we have in India is an 'Empire' - an
'Indian Empire' which is the successor to the old 'British
Indian Empire' of which
Queen Victoria was crowned as Empress.
The Austro Hungarian Empire and the
Ottoman Empire did not survive World War I and the British, French, Dutch
and Portuguese Empires did not survive World War II. It will be to engage in
the politics of the bird world (where we cackle to each other in English) to suggest that the Indian Empire
will survive as an Empire. It is no accident that a Gujerati does not stand for election
in Tamil Nadu, or a Tamil in Bengal, or a Marathi in Kashmir - and there is a
need to recognise and address this political reality. Mr. Manmohan Singh may want
to recognise that the unity of India will not be built by bland appeals to a non
existent 'composite culture'.
There are, ofcourse, those (including Marxists) who sometimes suggest
that conflicts amongst different national formations will be assuaged by economic growth. But
the reality is otherwise. Nationalism is not simply a matter of economics.
"Like religion,.. or any other great emotive
force, nationalism is ambivalent, and can escape very completely from a
prescribed political channel. Even in its origins, it was a complex
phenomenon, deriving both from the solidarity and from the divisions of
society. It would have astonished Marx to see socialism owing so much to
partnerships with nationalism in Afro-Asia and in the Soviet Union during
the second world war... " - V.Kiernan -
'Nationalist Movements and
Social Classes' in
Nationalist Movements
Anthony
D Smith (Ed), 1976
"Nationalism has proved an uncomfortable anomaly for Marxist theory
and precisely for that reason, has been largely elided, rather than confronted. How else
to account for the use, for over a century of the concept of the 'national bourgeoisie'
without any serious attempt to justify theoretically the relevance of the adjective? Why
is this segmentation of the bourgeoisie - a world class in so far as it is defined in
terms of the relations of productions - theoretically significant?
A nation is an imagined political community... It is imagined as a
community, because regardless of the actual inequality and exploitation that may prevail
in each, the nation is always conceived as a deep horizontal comradeship. Ultimately, it
is this fraternity that makes it possible, over the past two centuries, for so many
millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited
imaginings." *Benedict Anderson:
Imagined
Communities - Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 1991
Peoples speaking different languages, tracing their roots to
different origins, and living in relatively well defined and separate
geographical areas, do not somehow 'melt' and disappear - and, in any case, a
dependent
'third world' economy will not provide a large enough 'pot' for the 'melting' to
take place. The unity of India will not be built by a new economic colonialism
secured by easing barriers to entry by multinationals and by creating a
consumption hungry English speaking upper/middle class.
“The Asian “coolies” of the late 1800s and early 1900s came to the U.S.,
Australia, New Zealand and the West Indies as laborers, doing the physical,
backbreaking work westerners didn’t want to do. ... In this new century, India’s
tech workers are coming to be seen as nothing more than glamorized coolies (rich
coolies, but coolies still.) For the global corporate sector, India is just one
large back office, not a formidable economic force such as China or even a
political nuisance such as Pakistan...
The global corporate sector – understandably – will not shed light on these
issues. It is not in their interest. In fact, eased barriers to entry, a
consumption hungry upper class and cheap labor are major prizes in the new
economic colonialism... "
India: The Poverty of Progress
- Chandasi Pandya, 2005
Again, Mr.Manmohan Singh may want to pay attention to something
which Justin Podur
said a couple of months ago -
"..In the background of the Indo-US nuclear deal now going into
'overdrive', as
well as the increasing economic co-operation and (most importantly) the joint
military exercises and interoperability efforts and acquisitions made by India,
there is a geopolitical notion: that the US is building India's military
capacity in order to counter potential rivals China and Russia in the
region... (But) Empires don't build great powers. They build clients and dependencies..."
Empires Don't Build Rivals - Justin Podur
5 August 2008
Given all this, it should not surprise Mr.Manmohan Singh that a report, released on 14 October 2008,
as part of the 2008 Global Hunger Index, ranks India at 66 out 88 countries in
the Hunger Index.
Twelve Indian states (including Tamil Nadu) have "alarming" levels of
hunger while the situation is "extremely alarming" in the state of Madhya
Pradesh. -
"The report, released as part of the 2008 Global Hunger Index, ranks
India at 66 out 88 countries. The hunger index has been released by the International Food Policy Research
Institute (IFPRI) along with Welthungerhlife and the University of California.
It measures hunger on three indicators which include child malnutrition, rates
of child mortality and the number of people who are calorie deficient. The
problem of hunger is measured in five categories - low, moderate, serious,
alarming or extremely alarming. The survey says that not one of the 17 states in
India that were studied were in the low or moderate hunger category. "Despite years of robust economic growth, India scored worse than nearly 25
sub-Saharan African countries and all of South Asia, except Bangladesh," the
report says. The best performing state was Punjab, which has a 'serious' hunger
problem and does less well than developing countries such as Gabon, Vietnam and
Honduras. "
Hunger in India States
Alarming - BBC, 14 October 2008
Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh may want to pay more careful
attention to something which
Arundhati Roy
said an year ago in March 2007 when she was asked by Shoma Chaudhury of
Tehelka "There is an atmosphere of growing violence across the country. How
do you read the signs? In what context should it be read?" -
" You don’t have to be a genius to read the signs. We have a growing
middle class, reared on a diet of radical consumerism and aggressive
greed. Unlike industrialising Western countries, which had colonies
from which to plunder resources and generate slave labour to feed
this process, we have to colonise ourselves, our own nether parts.
We’ve begun to eat our own limbs.
The greed that is being generated
(and marketed as a value interchangeable with nationalism) can only
be sated by grabbing land, water and resources from the vulnerable.
What we’re witnessing is the most successful secessionist struggle
ever waged in independent India — the secession of the middle and
upper classes from the rest of the country. It’s a vertical
secession, not a lateral one. They’re fighting for the right to
merge with the world’s elite somewhere up there in the stratosphere.
..
to equate a resistance movement fighting against enormous
injustice with the government which enforces that injustice is
absurd. The government has slammed the door in the face of every
attempt at non-violent resistance. When people take to arms,
there is going to be all kinds of violence — revolutionary, lumpen and
outright criminal. The government is responsible for the monstrous
situations it creates...does this mean that people
whose dignity is being assaulted should give up the fight because
they can’t find saints to lead them into battle?. "
Yes, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is right to say that the violence
that is permeating Indian society is no accident. "You don't have to be a
genius to read the signs".
We are witnessing signs of increasing fissiparous tendencies
especially in areas like the North East, in Jammu & Kashmir, in Orissa and
Karnataka, in Assam and some other parts of our country. Sometimes the situation
is aggravated by external interests that wish to de-rail the essential unity of
India. Further, as witnessed recently in Orissa, Karnataka, Maharashtra and
Assam we see ethnicity and religion being used as arguments to stir divisions.
Violence seems to be permeating society to-day, across the length and breadth of
our country - whether it be terrorist violence, whether it is violence with an
ideological veneer such as that adopted by the Left Wing Extremists or Communal
violence. We need to meet to-day's mindless violence with the requisite amount
of force, but must also ensure that this is tempered by reason and justice which
is the normal order of governance.
The most disturbing and dangerous aspect to-day is the assault on our composite
culture. Ethnic and religious communities have lived together peacefully during
the past millennium. We take pride in the fact that people of all castes,
communities, religions and languages live together peacefully, and our culture
imbibes the best from each one of them. Yet to-day, we see fault-lines
developing between, and among, communities. Recent tragic events in Orissa,
Karnataka, and Assam have pained all right thinking persons. There are clashes
between Hindus, Christians, Muslims and Tribal groups. An atmosphere of hatred
and violence is being artificially generated. There are forces deliberately
encouraging such tendencies and also spawning militant outfits who engage in
irrational violence. These need to be firmly dealt with.
It is not by accident that these incidents are increasing in our society. As
members of the National Integration Council, we need to collectively consider
whether short-term narrow political ends are driving some of us to encourage
forces of divisiveness that are today threatening the unity of our people. A
country like ours which is defined by co-existence of different ethnic groups
and religions and cemented by an acceptance of a pluralistic and tolerant
framework cannot afford the promotion of such divisiveness for narrow partisan
ends. There is no politics that has a right to assert over the rights of the
common man or the integrity of our nation.
