Land of many contradictions
Men, Matters, Memories

By M L Kotru

India has variously been described as a sleeping giant, functioning anarchy, a country which made an atheistic Soviet leader loudly wonder that there must after all be a God to hold this land of many contradictions-multilingual, multicultural and multiracial-together. To most Indians, unknown to them, these are realities they have taken for granted and lived with. They will hark back to 5000 years and more and tell you how at different times, under different rulers, native and foreign, and how in the post-independence years have managed to stand together as one whenever the nation's security has been threatened.

Each one of these assumptions, enigmatically, is always passed on as the truth. Sleeping giant, yes. Functioning anarchy, very much so (remember the chaos of the just concluded Parliament session). Full of contradictions and self righteousness, very much so. But what should cause worry to us is that the image of the sleeping giant seems to be overshadowing all other attributes, even when they may not be altogether complimentary. Take the case of the recent killing of 16 jawans of the Border Security Force by Bangladeshis, never mind whether the killers belonged to the Bangladesh Security Forces or were plain villagers. The truth is that 16 jawans were killed, their bodies mutilated and returned only after India's sense of outrage became too difficult to contain. It took Dhaka more than two days to regret the killings and the mutilations. And two days after that we have the country's Foreign Ministry telling the world that it was the BSF jawans who had ventured into what he called Bangladesh territory.

In other words the Bangladesh Foreign office now wants us to believe that any future intrusion of the ill-defined, unmarked boundry will always be rebutted not just with force; brutality will be a part of the deal.

It obviously does not make much sense to Dhaka's top diplomat that the villages into which the BSF men are said to have 'tresspassed" are back in Indian hands and under Indian control as they had been ever since the birth of Bangladesh. The sacrifices made by Indian people and the Indian Army to make the birth of Bangladesh possible in 1971 is all but forgotten.

That Bangladeshi politicians may have their own compulsions to be seen as anti-Indian just prior to the elections in that ocuntry is another matter. To them India bashing is just a handy tool. That being so, how exactly is the sleeping giant expected to respond. Turn the other cheek? Let 16 jawans be killed, their bodies mutilated against all norms of international law, and assure Dhaka that we do understand its compulsions. Of course, our Foreign Office must and did protest the killings of Hasina Wajid did express her regret. Obviously New Delhi and Dhaka agreed that they must let this one pass. As they have done in the past, even when various terrorist outfits operating in the North East have operated from bases in Bangladesh. Dhaka is free even to harbour some of the known Indian absconders. That's the price we must pay for being deemed a good neighbour!

In the case of the brutal murder of BSF men the earlier fig leaf of their having been surrounded by over 1000 angry Bangladesh villagers and lynched, as it were by the mob has now been shed with the Foreign Ministry saying that they were killed in an encounter in which the BDR lost three of its men. Repeated requests in the past to the Bangladesh Government to drive out the North East terrorist from its territory have gone virtually unheeded. Nor has Dhaka really paid any heed to Indian concern over ISI activities along the India-Bangladesh border. The message obviously is that the sleeping giant must continue to sleep.

In nearby Nepal anti-Indian riots are arranged, as if on cue, over a statement which an Indian film star says he never made. The riots continue for days. The Nepalese Government looks on helplessly ignoring protests by the star and Indian Government spokesmen. Then one day it is discovered that the statement had been "manufactured" by a Kathmandu-based cable operator who obviously is in cahoots with Pakistani agents. A Pakistani diplomat is identified as one of the possible men linked to the hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane from Kathmandu to Kandhar via Pakistan 18 months ago. More than a year after the event the diplomat is caught red-handed in Kathmandu with huge quantities of RDX and we are now told that he had links not only with Pakistani terrorists operating in Jammu and Kashmir but also with Maoists playing havoc in Nepal itself. Questions are asked about the rash of the unusually large number of Kashmir's business that have sprung up in Kathmandu during the past five or six years -- transit points for narco-traffic and financing of militant outfits in Kashmir -- but the Nepalese authorities will not hear about it. India is trying to act the big bully, we are told.

That Bangladeshis have slipped into the Terai region of Nepal in droves is causing little concern even when Nepalese demographers point to more than hundred percent increase inthe Muslim population of the country, from the previous five percent to the present 11 per cent of the total Nepalese population. That even larger numbers of illegal Bangladeshi migrants have settled down in various parts of India is a different matter altogether and as history tells us they will soon be assimilated in the great Indian melting pot.

Sri Lanka has its own bone to pick with us. Several hundred Indian officers and Jawans may have died in pusuit of an idle dream dreamt by Rajiv Gandhi and Jayawerdene, the late Sri Lankan President, but for some reason the image persists that the Indian Peace Keeping Force had forced its way into that country. Nobody seems to remember that the Force was assigned to Sri Lanka at the Lankans' request. People even tend to forget that Rajiv was killed by LTTE activists who saw him as an enemy after the IPKF went into Sri Lanka. Even in off shore Maldives Indian Navy was requested to show its flag to put down brewing dissidence there which it did but President Gayoon for some reason is not always happy with us.

Pakistan is, of course, a different kettle of fish. Its obsession with Kashmir has not allowed it, ever since its birth 53 years ago, to think in terms of building up a good neighbourly relationship. Like other neighbouring countries it also holds India's size against her, never ceasing to build up the image of India as a big, belligerent bully, wanting to establish its hegemony over the region. Kashmir has remained a raging symbol of this obsession. In succession it has played the Americans (CENTO, SEATO Pacts) against India, used the Islamic card, offered to play (for a price) second fiddle to China in the latter's pursuit of its own objectives in the region. To propitiate the Chinese, Pakistan even ceded a vast tract in Jammu and Kashmir to Beijing.

In the overall context while it is good to find External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh building bridges of understanding with Washington, Iran and some other Muslim countries some thought needs to be given to shaking off the persisting image of "a sleeping giant", "a functioning anarchy". It's time to take foreign policy initiatives within the region itself if only to restore a semblance of reality to things as they stand in the region. India may have succeeded in part to disabuse the American mind of its tendency to equate India and Pakistan whenever it comes to US concerns in the region. But for her own good, New Delhi must adopt a more pro-active and realistic foreign policy posture in its relations with its immediate neighbours. SAARC is the most obvious forum for this kind of activity but for that to be effective New Delhi will first have to catch the Pakistani bull by the horn. If Kashmir is really the bone of contention there is no point in not talking to Pakistan directly and offering it a way out of the tangle. The Pant initiative in Jammu and Kashmir, I am afraid, does not look very promising. By offering a way out I am not suggesting offering Kashmir to Pakistan on a platter but to ask it to discuss the issue realistically taking the ground realities in the region and globally into consideration. An "Islamic" solution is not on the cards, it should be clearly stated.

Say, who did lose this newest election ?...............
Yours Randomly

By Dr R L Bhat

A story is told of an American who on his way to vote was offered five dollars by a Democrat to vote for his party. A little distance ahead, a Republican accosted him offering ten dollars to vote for Republicans. Asked who did he finally vote for and why, the sagely voter replied that he had chosen the latter for being less corrupt. The Indian voters, who went to vote this Thursday, do not have the consolation of even this specious distinction between the two leading contenders for.. the political spoils. Yes it is a straightforward contest for power there, in which ideology is only a pale excuse to forge compromises of convenience. If the Congress-Java-TMC alliance in Tamil Nadu strains the limits of credibility, the BJP-AGP get together in Assam puts policy and perspective right upon its head. Out in West Bengal, the contemporary history is putting forth its most farcical show with Mamta playing the ball with the Congress and the TNC chairman dancing the dais with Vajpayee.

If the Congress during its long years in power had proved itself a master of political subterfuge, the BJP in two short stints has almost equaled that record in deceit and dalliance. It is not just that the party that threatened to take the issue of Bangladeshi to streets is now talking of regularizing those tendentious stays with legitimate work-permits, or that it is busy attempting to out-scandal the grand old party of India with scams in every deportment of governance, or that it has proved as clay-footed as its bete noire Congress was whether in dealing with terrorism or direct challenges to the Indian sovereignty. More than that, it is the ease with which the BJP has slipped into the shoddy shoes that were worn by the Congress over its long trampling of the Indian hope and promise. Whether it is the dalals of defense contracts as shown by the tehelka episode, or the rutted bureaucracy in which the BJP rule has got firmly and by choice mired, or the gangs of power brokers who appear to be ruling the roost. The 'party with a difference' has become comfortably cozy with all that was rotten in the Congress rule. Without any indication of discomfort or diffidence. So, what is there for the voter to elect, to choose, or to defeat?

Little. Very little. Nothing. Perhaps the subtlety should have become evident much earlier. Even in those 'revolutionary days' of 1977, ideological antagonists BJP and the leftists had joined hands through tenuous spreads of socialists, Lohiaites, Gandhians.. all, to foist the Janata deception upon the people. Ten years later, after rounds of bickerings and breakings, these natural antagonists again rallied together behind V P Singh. Only to break and bounce away, again. The last decade of the present century was a thunderous study in penchant of the Indian political outfits for compromise, with scant regard for stands, policies or ideological planks. Over these years, the burgiose and the proletariat, the industry-wallahs and the mazdoor-touter, the liberal and the conservative, the democrat and the obscurantist, the modern and the orthodox.. all, have coupled together in attempts to produce a.. any possible claimant for office. With dozens of one-man, one-woman shows thrown in to fill in the numbers. For numbers alone matter in this game, there. The magic numbers have been arrayed. And how ! Conjure up any permutation and it combined to lap up power, think of any probability and it came to be to share the spoils, deem of any possibility and it materialized to eat away the cake called India.

That is the legacy the new millennium has become heir to. And, a true offspring it continues to follow the example in bland, blatant display. So what does the Keralite voter have to look forward to, in this newest election apart from a replay of the spectacle he has been witnessing for over two decades now? It is the same songsters running to the same music, moving around the very same chairs they have been befouling for decades by turns. In Tamil Nadu, there are the same gangs in new regroupings, one promoting the self, another the sun, and others their petty personas as the promises of the millennium. Add Aurobindo's Pondicherry and there you have the elitest of the Indian states and voters driven to a tomfoolery in the name of popular choice. In Assam, all pre-election foes are friends and earlier friends foes, in new configurations to fool the people, rather to openly. All believing, rather too knowingly, it is in the west Bengal of the barest farce that at least a new ray is coming up. Though even before its hope could show, the image has soured with the signs of the same rancidity that saw one time stalwart champions become shoddy schemesters. Yes, nothing to choose there; nothing to win. Save, of course, the new leases to old agendas, new avenues for the old opportunists. Inevitably, one of these calculations would get through. And hail its manipulation as the newest victory of the 'people of India'. There would begin yet another round of the history, replaying the farces it turns its tragedies into. India that would be roundly beaten in this round would go lauding its winners! But isn't it the original sin reporting back? In the apocryphal American anecdote isn't the voter who goes about pocketing fivers and tenners without a a compunction, and gets presumptuous enough to pass loaded moral judgements, the most corrupt of all? The real culprit? The real loser, too!