India has just finished celebrating Republic Day, and
as the chests of millions of Indians swelled with pride at the thought of our
immense diversity and imagined military prowess, it is well to reflect on what
kind of Republic the country has become. We may begin with some
elementary if often forgotten meanings of the word “republic”: a
republican form of government is not merely one in which the head of state is
not a hereditary monarch; rather, the modern republic rests on the idea that
sovereignty resides in the people, and that the will of the people, as
expressed through their representatives, is supreme.
What has, however, been
critical to the idea of the ‘republic’ everywhere is the notion of
inclusiveness, even if this does not form part of the word’s typical dictionary
definition. In this respect, the stories that have been coming out of India in
recent years tell a tale that is chilling to the bones, a tale which leaves
behind a stench that no amount of sloganeering about ‘swacch Bharat’ or even
something more than a symbolic wielding of the broom can eradicate. If
inclusiveness is the touchstone of a Republic, what is characteristic of India
today is how increasingly large constituencies are being excluded from the
nation. Muslims and Dalits have been hounded, garroted, and lynched; the
working class is being trampled upon; the Adivasi is nothing more than an
obstacle course for a mining company. None of this is news, some might
argue; perhaps things have only become worse. Such a view is profoundly
mistaken, because whatever India may have been in the past, it has never been,
certainly not to the extent it is today, a Republic of Inhospitality.
There are other ways, too, of understanding the pass at which we
have arrived. On his last day of office some months ago, the Vice President,
Hamid Ansari, warned that Muslims were feeling increasingly insecure in
India and that there was a corrosion of Indian values.
His successor, Venkaiah Naidu, was dismissive of these remarks and shot back, “Some people are saying
minorities are insecure. It is a political propaganda. Compared to the entire
world, minorities are more safe and secure in India and they get their due.”
The Prime Minister, who appears a model of graciousness when he is in the
company of foreign dignitaries but has been glaringly contemptuous of political
opponents and previous occupants of his office, could not resist taking a dig at Mr. Ansari.
The veteran politician, Mr. Modi suggested, had spent too much time in the
company of Muslims—at Aligarh Muslim University, as a member of the Minorities
Commission, and as a representative of India to West Asia—and his sympathies
did not really lie with India. One should, of course, not expect anything
else from this Prime Minister, What Naidu and the Prime Minister failed to
understand was Ansari’s unease at the fact that India no longer seemed a
hospitable place to him. India does not even remotely feel like a hospitable
place to the Africans who have been set upon by mobs or to those from the
Northeast who been humiliated and killed since they seem too much like the
Chinese—aliens all.
African students injured
in mob attacks in Noida, Uttar Pradesh, April 2017. Source: http://www.sikhpa.com/sikh-group-condemns-racist-mob-attack-against-africans-in-india/
More than anything else, India has long been a land of
hospitality. I use the word hospitality with
deliberation and with the awareness that our present crop of middle-class
Indians who study hotel management and business administration with gusto will
assume that I am speaking of the ‘hospitality industry’. There is a
different story to be told here about how some of the richest words in the
English language have been hijacked for the narrowest purposes. I use
hospitality in place of tolerance since both the right and the left have
demonstrated their intolerance for ‘tolerance’. To liberals and the left
in India, all discussion of Hindu tolerance is merely a conceit and at worst a
license to browbeat others into submission. Surprisingly, but perhaps
not, the advocates of Hindutva are equally unenthusiastic about proclaiming the
virtues of ‘Hindu tolerance’. It was Hindu tolerance that, in their view,
made the Hindus vulnerable to the depredations of foreign invaders.
‘Hindu tolerance’ is only for the weak and the effete.
.
A delegation of students
protesting the death of 19-year old Nido Taniam, a student from Arunachal
Pradesh killed in the south Delhi colony of Lajpat Nagar. Photo
Source: Press Trust of India.
What, then, does it mean
to speak of the culture of hospitality that has long characterized India and
that is eroding before our very eyes, turning this ancient land into a most
inhospitable place not only for foreign tourists, African students, and the
various people of northeast India, but even for the greater majority of its own
citizens? We may take as illustrative of this culture of hospitality
three narratives that are humbling in their complex simplicity. There is
a story that is often told about the coming of the Parsis to India, although
some doubt its veracity. As they fled Iran, so the story goes, they were
stopped on the border as they sought to make their way into India. The
Indian king already had far too many people in his dominions and could not
accommodate any more refugees. The cup was full. The Parsis are
said to have responded, ‘We shall be like the sugar that sweetens the cup of
tea.’
Parsis outside their Fire
Temple, Mumbai.
Those who wish to make the story plausible will offer dates and
there may be mention of the political dynasty that prevailed in Western India in
the 8th century with whom the first batch of Parsis would have
come into contact. The story may well be apocryphal, though if that is
the case it is wholly immaterial: its persistence suggests something not
only about the tenor of those times but the continuing attractiveness of the
idea that those who came to India have each, in their own fashion, sweetened
the pot and added something to the country. But there may have been many
other registers of hospitality in India, as Tagore sought to explain to his
audience on a visit to China. The Mahsud, a Pathan tribe inhabiting the
South Waziristan Agency in what is now the Federally Administered Tribal Area
(FATA) in Pakistan, were being bombed from the air. A plane crash landed
in one of the villages; the pilot was desperately trying to extricate himself
from the plane which was already on fire. Though the villagers had been
plummeted by this very pilot, they ran to the plane and lifted him out of the
cockpit; he was wounded, but they nursed him back to health; and some weeks
later he made his way back to England. It was a culture, indeed an ideal,
of hospitality, and their notion of dharma, that made the villagers act as they
did; however, as Tagore tellingly adds, their behavior was “the product of centuries
of culture” and was “difficult of imitation.”
Though Nehru shepherded
the country after independence, it was Mohandas Gandhi more than anyone else
who was committed to the constituent idea of the Republic, that is inclusivity
and what I have described as hospitality. It is, therefore, fitting that
my last story should end with him. Gandhi was a staunch vegetarian, but
he often had visitors to the ashram who were accustomed to having meat at
nearly every meal. He took it upon himself to ensure that they were
served meat; and he also adhered to the view that if he had insisted that they
conform to the rules of the ashram and confine themselves to vegetarian food,
he would be visiting violence upon them. Although reams and reams have been
written upon his notion of ahimsa, little has been said of how hospitality was
interwoven into his very notion of nonviolence. And, yet, it is in this
very India that Muslims and Dalits have been killed on the mere suspicion of
eating, hoarding, and transporting beef. On this Republic Day, at least,
Indians should ponder on precipitous has been the decline of their country into
a Republic of Inhospitality.
The above is from Vinal Lal's blog at:https://vinaylal.wordpress.com/2018/01/27/a-republic-of-inhospitality-india-january-26th/
[A
slightly shorter version of this was published under the same title in the
online edition of The Indian Express, 27 January 2018.]
