Is intolerance overtaking us?

The other day, at a farewell party for a western diplomat, I was holding forth on religious tolerance and composite culture when the diplomat placed his hand on my shoulder and walked with me to the far corner of the room. ‘‘Your optimism about Indian secularism is touching’’ he said, ‘‘but surely you know the horrible things they say when you are not there’’. I made light of it. Faith, shaped in a lifetime of experience and reflection, I said, is unlikely to be shaken by cocktail gossip. But the fact is that the warning uttered furtively in my ear did not evaporate quite so suddenly.

Are we becoming a more intolerant people? In an article last week I tried to reconstruct from memory the emotions experienced by me and my family on the earliest Independence day I could remember. For generations, the family had been with the Congress and therefore on the question of Partition they were more with Maulana Azad — opposed to it. For us, therefore, independence came at a very heavy price. Not only the nation, families too were divided.

The tragedy of the people of Punjab was brutal and swift. The lingering, perpetual tragedy of divided Indian families is less well known. When anger against the Congress party erupted in the aftermath of the Babri Masjid demolition, the list of grievances against the Congress included (for many of us) the fact that it was the Congress which accepted the Partition plan.

My article was in this sort of vein. But the reaction from friends has been sharp. How dare I blame the Congress for Partition? Jinnah and the Muslim League wanted Pakistan and the Muslims supported them. That, in the popular middle class mind, is how Pakistan was formed.

It is an awkward debate to promote because it can be misunderstood on both sides of the divide. The authors of the Pakistani state (as distinct from the people) will say: there they go again, digging into the past, questioning how we came about. On the Indian side, the reasons for avoiding a debate is for a complex variety of reasons. At the informed level the debate has the potential of exposing leaders of the national movement as men with feet of clay who, at a critical moment, even repudiated the Mahatma.

In the middle class mind, Partition has registered as a straightforward Hindu-Muslim thing. How else do you explain the celebrations in Ayodhya after the fall of the Babri Masjid, as recorded by Newstrack, being heavily laced with anti-Pakistan rhetoric. A movement for the reconstruction of a temple for Lord Rama was expending its ire against Pakistan? Babri Masjid, a symbol of Muslim imposition, had been demolished and so all taunts had to be directed against Pakistan which symbolised the ‘Muslim’ on the subcontinent. How dangerously warped the thinking!

The late Nikhil Chakravarti reported that Nehru had, during a visit to Shantiniketan in 1954, admitted that ‘‘people were not involved’’ in partitioning the country. Only leaders were. If only this candid admission could have been amplified and sustained by other Congress leaders as well, the air would have been cleansed of the sort of communalism which fed on the erroneous notion that Muslims had partitioned the country and stayed on.

This flies in the face of the mantra which keeps this nation, including Kashmir, together: ‘Indian secularism protects, among a billion others, the world’s second largest Muslim population, greater than the population of Pakistan, and any issue, including Kashmir, must be addressed in such a way that this fabric is not ruptured’.

The extraordinary success of Lagaan provokes a question and creates room for considerable optimism. A village cricket team, cutting across caste and communal lines, is forged against a particularly oppressive English officer. How does this coalition (the village cricket team) hold in the absence of the hated ‘‘other’’?

I cannot remember a more beautiful celebration of Janamashtami — Aamir Khan as Krishna, Javed Akhtar’s lyrics and A.R. Rahman’s music. Was this a contrived collection of three Muslims celebrating the Krishna legend in pursuit of some secular ideal? Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The Janamashtami sequence in Lagaan is part of a long tradition which includes Saiyid Ibrahim Raskhan’s unsurpassable poems on Krishna’s childhood or Nazir Akbarabadis’s: ‘‘aisa tha baansuri ke bajaiyya/ ka baal pan/ kya, kya likhoon main krishn/ kanhaiyya ka baal pan’’. (The beauty of his childhood was beyond words). Or Yaas Yagana Changezi: ‘‘Krishn ka hun pujari/ Ali ka banda hoon/ Yagana, shaan-e-khuda/ Dekh kar raha na gaya’’. (I am a pujari of Krishna and a devotee of Ali. Yagana, I could not help taking a bow whenever I saw the wonders of God)
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Only when we remember these poets every Janmashtami are we likely to strengthen the nation. Where a departing diplomat does not have to furtively warn me against the storm of communalism gathering behind me and which I cannot see because I am a deluded fool, wrapped in nostalgia of poets and cultures no longer relevant.

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