Of dreams and nightmares

My young friend Kirit (name changed) is one of the finest humans I have come across. He fits this description given in a Bangla poem by Jeebanananda Dash, a poem that I happened to translate yesterday. Kirit is one of

“Those who still have profound faith in humans,
Those who even now believe
In glorious truths, traditions, arts, and deep pursuits …”

In a moment I will come back to Kirit, but first, let me revisit a day that changed the course of our history: 6/12/1992, when Babri Majid was demolished and a process began to change the secular democratic structure of our country. The process is on, with ever gathering momentum. Yesterday, 4/8/2019 was another dark day in the history of modern India, when Jammu and Kashmir was bifurcated and its two parts were demoted to the status of Union Territories by using the brute force of a majority in the parliament, with complete disregard to the wishes of the people of the state, and after turning the entire Kashmir Valley into a jail for all practical purposes.

Yesterday, I happened to exchange notes with Kirit and he wrote to me, “… take a long view of the short and calm yourself.”

Please allow me to share with you my reply to him.

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You have hit the nail on the head: “… take a long view of the short.”

I will try to, but before that, as I’ve found in you a sympathetic reader, I’ll let me hair down and share with you why I’ve been feeling so helpless and tormented today, although it’s perhaps an old man’s tale that could be understood by his generation alone.

When we were young, our nation was young too, beginning afresh after 190 years of life-sapping colonial rule. Almost everyone then believed that the future would offer a more just and at least a little more egalitarian world. There was a spring of hope everywhere: from the Prague Spring to the defeat of the US forces against tiny Vietnamese in the most asymmetric war in history, to the campus rebellions around the world …. We knew that the second law of thermodynamics couldn’t be altered, but we did believe that collectively, the human race would work towards a better, more civilized order, at the core of which would be two basic ideas: free thought and respect for every human being.

When I was 18, I never imagined that 50 years later India would have become a nakedly capitalist economy where income disparity would keep growing, with no one protesting. It didn’t even cross my mind that the Indian Hindus, tolerant to a fault and traditionally accommodating to other faiths through centuries, will suddenly become so intensely hateful towards Muslims and Christians and Dalits. We read in papers that in the Balkans, minorities were brutalised and put in concentration camps to die. We read about ethnic oppressions in China, Turkey, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and so on. But we thought these could never happen in our country. We were wrong.

Suddenly, in India today, there is a systematic effort to push a third of the population into a corner. The next move by our ruling party will be to win West Bengal and go for NRC everywhere and put undocumented (non)citizens read Muslims in jail.

By denying Muslims, Dalits and Christians the right to live a decent life, by denying the space for unfettered intellectual enquiry at universities, by propagating atrocities in the name of science, by destroying every institution, they are actually destroying the dream of the post-independence generation.

It hurts. 

But in these days of atavistic faith towards aggressive gods, we must stoically remember that in the long run, every dictator is thrown to their disgraceful end. For example, the longest serving dictator of the twentieth century, General Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939 till his death in 1975. Dictatorship was overturned in Spain almost immediately after the dictator’s death. So much for his legacy! Sometime in the 1990s, a senior friend of mine visited Franco’s grave near Madrid. But he couldn’t go close to it because the entire place stank of urine. So, he happily contributed to the liquid offering to the dead dictator.

No dictator today will be dissuaded by the thought of the future peeing on his legacy, but it gives us courage. In his last speech in 1941, Rabindranath said, “I am struck by the changes that have taken place both in my own attitude and in the psychology of my countrymen – a change that carries within it a cause of profound tragedy.”

We did come out of the tragedy which manifested itself in the devastating riots before and after the Partition. And we started building a new India which offered women’s suffrage before Sweden did, which put a premium on education and research, and on agricultural technology that would create a famine-free India sooner than anyone could hope. I am not saying that despite these achievements the system was not highly imperfect. But there were always reasons to hope.

Now, the nation has taken an about turn, but I believe this too will pass. My only dream today is to live long enough to see the end of this nightmare.

06 August 2019