Introduction
By subjecting India to review, thereby bringing it under the cynics’, sceptics’ and critiques’ microscope, the MS has really opened a floodgate.
As of now there are at least 30 interesting and important reviews, and several comments on them. To add a new review to this already rich collection should necessarily mean going through all these reviews and the comments on them carefully.
I must admit I have not done so. Partly because, after sitting before my PC for about 8 hours (though the Service Engineer reloaded the Windows 98 and made my Internet Connections work, after he left, the Internet Connections failed again, and I spent a lot of time to reactivate them through trials and errors. I must add I do not have a very advanced and sophisticated PC!). When my hope died (I did not revert to type, as the saying when hope dies men revert to type goes!), and I was about to start my reading for a lecture on Perspectives on Fundamentalism, which I have to deliver to about 100 persons, mostly MA Theology/Philosophy students on this 15th, suddenly I saw my two connections activated as never before, and the first thing I did was to download my e-mails. Of about 100 and odd e-mails, a number of them the usual Spam, I looked for e-mails from the MS, and thus saw the several Reviews on India (though through an e-mail sujay had already threatened me with his review!).
For my purpose I have picked up only the first seven Reviews. When I get time I will go through the remaining and post my comments on them. If what I am doing could be construed as discriminatory, I must apologise in advance.
The idea of Reviewing India is certainly welcome. In fact, later the MS could put together all the Reviews and Comments and with suitable editing and thematic arrangement bring out the same as an e-book.
India as a Product
While I am not for treating India as a Product, probably the MS could not think of a different format. India is not a Product in the sense of a commodity, though it could be seen as a Product in very many other senses such as of history, culture, civilisation sweeps, freedom struggle, and framing of the Constitution.
The idea of having India’s national flag decorating all the Reviews is well thought out. In fact, that by itself speaks a lot about the underlying motivation of having Reviews on India, and makes the MS patriotism writ large on it.
An Overview of India
If I remember right, it is Rakesh’s Review, which gives basic data on India, such as its total area, population, languages, and religion. Some elaboration of languages (not just more than 10, but many more as recognised by the Indian Constitution), and religions, and details of regional, social, economic and cultural diversities in terms of the caste system, the rural-urban divide, natural calamities, seasons, the advanced and backward States and regions and so on, which are now available as part of the 2001 Census would have made this brief Introduction itself a rich data-base.
Democracy and universal citizenship
Rakesh would have India’s Government as Democracy. My response is only a qualified YES. We have to go a long way to be a full-blown democracy, and I shall give a link to an elaboration of this at the end of this Review.
I appreciate Rakesh’s sentimentalism (I have used this for want of a better word and no Pun is intended) that he is an Indian as well as a Global citizen is well said. So also his assertion that he is as sensitive to India’s problems as of Afghanistan. Such sensitivity should, however, get dampened, when one thinks of the American weaponry for mass destruction and its reckless use against weak countries.
On the broader issue of universal citizenship, I remember, when Indira Gandhi was at the height of her popularity, through the press I pleaded for Universal citizenship, with Indira Gandhi as a World Prime Minister! When Alexander Solzhenitsyn was banished (or did leave Russia on his own?), and India offered him citizenship, I again pleaded for Universal citizenship.
When I look back I realise that I made these pleas when I was at my romantic best (in a Platonic sense), at the prime of my youth, and that societies, leave alone the world, are much more complex than one can ever comprehend. None other than Noam Chomsky in an interview recently said this, though I am not sure if I have conveyed his response correctly.
The Kashmir issue
Rakesh is possessive of Kashmir. Well, I am not, for at least two reasons. One, the spectre haunting Jammu and Kashmir is deeply embedded in India’s colonialism, and history of freedom struggle, and one may go back the colonial creation of princes (by making others paupers!) as its bulwark.
Blaming ourselves as citizens for what our politicians, their hangers-on, and the bureaucrats have been doing is only partly true. For, who are this WE? They are the Indian electorate. Unlike the Western democracies, Indian electorate have yet to learn what democracy is all about. This cannot happen in the near future as nearly half of India’s population is still illiterate, and of the rest, only a negligible part is literate in the real sense of the term. In this context, I may conclude this paragraph with four quotes, the first two from Bertrand Russell’s Autobiography, and the rest from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, architect of the Indian Constitution:
Electoral stupidity, Constitutional morality
1) And at last I began to feel that all politics are inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quick-witted torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power.
2) Democracy has at least one merit namely, that a member of Parliament cannot be stupider than his constituents, for the more stupid he is, the more stupid they were to elect him.
3) Constitutional morality is not a natural sentiment. It
has to be cultivated. We must realise that our people have yet to learn it. Democracy in India is only a top-dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic. However good a Constitution may be, it is sure to turn out bad because those who are called to work it happen to be a bad lot.
4) On January 26, 1950, we are going to enter into a life of contradictions. In politics we will have equality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. We must remove this contradiction at the earliest possible moment or else those who suffer from inequality will blow up the structure of political democracy, which this Assembly has so laboriously built up.
I said, I do not feel possessive of Kashmir for two reasons, and said the above in the context of the first. My second reason is, as Bernard Shaw said, patriotism is extended selfishness.
This does not mean that I support terrorism, and Pakistan’s claim over Kashmir. At the best of times democracy is only a rhetoric of expectations and even in the U.S., which recently celebrated its 225th year of democracy, democracy has serious limitations.
While as a nascent democracy India is bound to have more and more serious limitations, the litmus test of the working of real democracy is how much freedom those in power give to those who dissent. When all is said, a nation, particularly a federal democracy is like a Joint Family. And like the Joint Family a federal democracy is bound to be in a process of fission and fusion.
