Blabberwocky: e-Arijit.com » Politics

Where Have All The Indians Disappeared?

Arijit — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:37:01 +0000

India, a-la-Thackeray et al

The recent verbal attacks by Bal Thackeray on Sachin Tendulkar have been subject to a lot of criticism, and a lot of severe criticism. Similar retaliation was seen when Raj Thackeray laid siege on the fame of Amitabh Bachchan, and before that, too, when Raj’s men beat up Biharis writing the Railways’ Recruitment Test in Maharashtra. These events are very disturbing to me personally, because I’ve grown up in Delhi, the national capital, and still call it home. In that city, everyone is from everywhere, as a friend puts it. There are no indigenous people, and likewise, there are no outsiders. Regionalism is something we learnt about only in our Social Studies class, and even then, it was only a term. Traveling away from home after finishing school, I did notice subtle boundaries between the regions of our country, but I doubt these have ever been made so daunting by the open politicization of regionalism we are seeing today.

Xenophobia is something that is innate in all humans. And, in a multicultural, multilingual country like ours, it is but certain that people from different ethnic backgrounds will have some level of discomfort mixing freely with each other. But at length, they blend in, augmented by the feeling that they are all Indians, after all. Unity in diversity, as all of us were taught in school. However, it seems our politicians are now learning to tap this potential for misleading the electorate by singing the exact opposite. And the electorate, disillusioned by the apparent damage to their identity dealt by ‘outsiders’, rush to support these new-age separatists. So disillusioned this said patriotism is, that these people forget that they are Indians first and foremost, and that their ethnicity (Marathi, Kashmiri, Bengali, etc) are only secondary. And so disillusioned their leaders are with winning votes, that they do not have any idea what seeds they might be planting.

Yes, separatist is exactly the term. What else would you call people who threaten and beat up their own countrymen just because of their ethnicity? And who knows, what these xenophobic tendencies could lead to if unchecked. Remember the Balkans in the 90′s? We already have separatist groups for Kashmir and the Northeastern states. Those subtle boundaries between the ethnic regions of India are suddenly becoming more and more distinct. It chills my bones to imagine what would happen if this regionalism morphs into fanaticism. Maybe this is too far-fetched, but what we’re seeing today really is the first sign of the collapse of a nation. Something which is even more chilling, given that Raj Thackeray is part of the new generation, and so are many of his supporters. I’m certain that I’ll never sell my vote to regionalism, but I’m worried many of my contemporaries will. I sincerely hope my fears are unfounded, and that Indians remain Indians. Jaya He.

(Map represents not the official international boundaries, but merely the territory that is administered by the Goverment of India)

Yeah, We Have Thousands Of Rivers In The Plains, But It’s Not Raining!

Arijit — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 19:27:37 +0000

We’re stepping into a new era as a nation. The wounds of our past have left us with scars, but they don’t hurt now. The dust hasn’t settled yet, but we can see through it. We’re weak, but alive, so alive and bustling with energy and oozing with potential. These are things we’ve been taught in school, these are things those hoardings screaming India Shining in our faces five years ago were, and subtler entities today are trying to tell us. It is a notion that we’ve been happy to let seep into our consciousness, and oblivious to us, it has been displacing and replacing our common sense. Till we read in the papers:

Monsoon Worries Drag Nifty Below 4450

News of droughts makes me sick, it makes me very sick indeed. Geography was one of my favourite subjects till it was there, and in most NCERT geography textbooks, you can find a chapter dedicated to the powerful rivers of India. And so it pains me to know that our plains, which are crisscrossed by so many rivers, are terribly drought-prone (it shocks me that they’re also flood-prone at the same time, but let’s deal with the drought here). And that is because we don’t consider these perennially flowing rivers to be a reliable source of water. No, what is reliable is the Monsoon, which is unpredictable, and which gives a blank to random regions at will.

This is where the bubble bursts. All that talk about industrialization and modernization falls flat, as we discover that our economy is primarily governed by agriculture, and this agriculture itself is weak and hapless in the face of a recurring crisis. A crisis we cry about when borrowing from our friends at the IMF, toy with before elections, and ignore thereafter. Irrigation is almost a forgotten issue now, and all we hear about is states asking for funds when drought hits, so that the people can be rehabilitated (and the babus’ pockets can be filled in the process). Yet when it comes to prevent these crises, we sit back and worship Lord Indra and pray that the Monsoon is fair to us.

Servitude seems to be inherent in Indian mentality. Whether it comes to treating Whites as royalty (oh, but we do rape their women, so that evens out, right?), falling to the feet of the party supremo even as one is to take oath as a minister of the cabinet (one wonders if the oath is to serve the people or the boss), or depending on the Monsoons though nature has given us such a valuable resource to use in the form of our rivers. The crores that are spent on rehabilitation could be spent on development of irrigation, but how can we be independent? We need to be slaves, and so we shall be. Start praying for next year’s Monsoons already, for climate change might just be a reality.

How the BJP is Making it Increasingly Difficult For Me to Vote for It

December — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 18:27:33 +0000

…and why I will vote for it anyway

The upcoming general elections will be the first time I’ll be eligible to vote. The last time they were held, I was 17, one year short of being eligible for franchise, but I never thought the Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) needed extra votes. However, as the results were declared, I watched in frustration as the Congress (Indian National Congress, shortened to Congress) and its allies went past the BJP. The frustration changed to annoyance when the Left front (read Communists; yes, we still have communists in India, clinging on to their obsolete ideals) lent outside support to the Congress and helped them form the goverment. And this was followed by disgust after the drama over who’d take 7, Race Course Road. This time though, I wonder why I’m still favouring the BJP.

The recent events must have cast a huge question mark over the credibility of the BJP. Firstly, they have a rift between the party general secretary and the party president. I mean, it’s not a rift between two party workers in Chhattisgarh; it is a rift between Arun Jaitley and Rajnath Singh. Worse, their Prime Ministerial candidate (and heir-apparent to A.B. Vajpayee) L.K. Advani says there is no internal friction. Three bigwigs walking totally out of sync. How can you expect this group of people to perform if elected to power?

And then there’s the saffron factor. Varun Gandhi was supposedly the BJP’s counter to Rahul Gandhi, though the former was never given a fraction of the spotlight which the Congress gave to their prince-in-waiting Rahul. Now, Varun is well on its way to join the fundamentalistic faction of his party, the one which is rapidly losing the support of our generation, not so much because of its anti-Muslim ideology, but because of its inefficiency. Despite repeated attempts by the moderate section of the party to distance itself from the hardline stance, they have failed. This is clearly visible in the way the party initially was disapproving of Varun’s near-fanatic statements a few days ago, but has now thrown its weight behind him. Almost enough for me to declare my vote is up for grabs.

However, when I look to the other side, I find the Congress has even bigger flaws. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, an erudite, experienced and honorable man no doubt, is probably the weakest person to head the Executive. Meek and soft, he has always lacked the kind of aggressive confidence Vajpayee exuded even when his knees were literally crumbling under him. Still, I expected him and his Finance Minister, the equally skilled P. Chidambaram, to form a very stable partnership and keep the Indian economy booming, but they failed there too. Of course, they were held down by the omnipresent Left who sometimes almost made the entire Government look like socialists. They even tried to pin down the Civilian Nuclear Deal with the US, because oh, your Government stand because of our support, so you cannot strike a deal with Capitalist pigs. Thankfully, the deal went through, a great leap forward in our quest for self-sufficiency in energy, though I doubt what hidden clauses it contained.

Then came 26/11, the details of which I shall exclude here. The Congress, and sadly, many Indians, believe that we won the post-26/11 pseudo-war. But we have not. Pakistan has successfully diverted attention away from the Mumbai attack by instigating the failed rebellion in Bangladesh (which queerly happened as soon as the pro-India Sheikh Hasina formed the government there), and by creating a false state of turmoil within its own borders. Pakistan did not concede anything, and all India achieved was a temporary international pressure on it. Ask Sonia Gandhi and she’ll tell you it’s even bigger than Kargil ’99. Of course, she is the Congress party’s HRH (her royal highness, if you missed it). Mahatma Gandhi never ruled India, but his lesser descendants are definitely ‘the’ dynasty in Indian politics. And HRH Rahul Gandhi will soon take the baton from the Queen Mother.

But one thing for which I will never forgive the Congress is the implementation of the second wave of reservations for the so-called backward classes. Many of these backward people can be seen dangling gold watches and carrying around laptops but hey, they’re backward because they’ll vote for the party who fooled them by reserving seats in higher education while not doing anything for primary education. As part of the academia, I cannot find a more blatant insult to the intellectual capital of the country than this. I know the BJP, in the shape it is right now, is not fit to rule my country, but it is still far better than the Congress. You decide whom you wish to choose.

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