Commentary/Dilip D' Souza

Real Indians are, naturally, the ones who beat their chests about bashing Pakistan and China into peanut butter

I keep waiting, day after day. Column after column, letter to the editor after letter to the editor, email message after email message, political passion after political passion; I wade through all of these, waiting always. Some time, somewhere, I hope I will finally see it: a sign that on that other side of the fence, there is space for concern for some of the country's most urgent problems.

Like drinking water for hundreds of millions who don't have it. Like primary education. Like toilets. Like basic health care -- not fancy hospitals, just minimal, functioning health centres.

I wait in vain. The rath yatra man never chooses drinking water as the theme for his yatras. My email-pals never mention health care. My columnist colleagues never choose to write about education. It's almost as if there's a studied, palpable aversion to these issues among all these people. So palpable, that I begin wondering: have I got it all wrong? On some cosmic scale, are these the really inconsequential issues? Is it really that the Gods of various stripes care more for destroying mosques, for renaming cities, for the various other tasks the self-appointed champions of Hinduism undertake so very enthusiastically?

I don't know. I do know that pointing these issues out is the only way to get the champions to say anything about them. But when you point them out, they promptly brand you as "out of touch" with the reality of India. If you muse about the fate of the always forgotten underprivileged, you are dismissed as a communist; and didn't you know, that particular ideology has gone the way of the dinosaur. Or there's the easily made, if feeble, argument that after all India has been ruled for 50 years by "those who share your ideology." So, they mean to imply, it's your fault in any case. (In the same breath, they will also tell you India has had several thousand years of culture based on Hinduism -- but no implications are allowed there).

In this dim, two-dimensional world, if you don't agree with what they call Hindutva, you must perforce have agreed with whoever has ruled India these 50 rather long years. (And you're a commie anyway). Actually, that's a harmless connection to make. What's far worse is that also in this world, the only danger to the country is from foreigners, especially the Pakistani and Chinese breeds. Blinded by that fear, they see no danger from within, from the continuing oblivion that the issues within must contend with. So the true patriots, the real Indians, are, naturally, the ones who beat their chests about bashing those countries into peanut butter. How naive, even laughable, to worry about the threats from right here in India!

Take just one very small example that a friend who works with tribals in Orissa wrote to me about. These desperately poor people are already reeling under the effects of the drought that ravaged the state in 1996. Now they face further misery. This time, it is caused by a government agency that was set up to buy from them the produce, like tamarind, they gather in the forest. The fair price the agency is supposed to pay them for forest produce is a much needed supplement to their meagre incomes, the difference between starvation and survival.

But this year, the agency has refused to buy any produce from tribals. The reason? The price an advisory committee has set for the produce, claims the agency, is too high, even though it is below market prices in nearby towns. The peculiar laws under which the agency operates make it impossible for the tribals to sell to other buyers either: in Orissa, it is illegal for anyone but this agency to transport forest produce. Nor can the tribals hold on to their tamarind in the hope of a resolution to this mess, for it spoils quickly and then is worthless.

The immediate result of all this: The tribals have to sell their produce illegally to a kind of forest mafia that pays a fraction of the price they got last year. But the mafia is only the beginning of a whole truckload of trouble.

"It's no wonder", writes my friend, "that these tribals are turning to the Naxalites who come from Andhra Pradesh."

Of course, when Naxalite movements gather strength, there's much clamour on that other side of the fence: about terrorism, how it must be dealt with ruthlessly, what happened to the beloved TADA law, all that. But the terrorism has its roots squarely in the poverty, the neglect, the misery, that hundreds of millions face every single day. When these things are not addressed, we saddle ourselves with problems like in Assam, or Punjab, or Kashmir, or the Naxalites, or other groups like them that operate all over the country.

That other side of the fence shows no interest in speaking about, let alone addressing, these roots. There are other priorities, other preoccupations. There's a rath yatra about a temple and a mosque. What improvement that brought to even a single Indian life, quite apart from the destruction it brought to thousands, L K Advani has not felt the need to explain to us.

There's the loud furore about conversions. Yes, the missionary fervour of the Church scares the daylights out of me. That 70 per cent of India has no sanitation, that 50 per cent cannot read and write, these things scare me much more. It's that simple.

We have that vapid injunction to "Love India or leave it!" Vapidity is one thing. But nobody asked those tribals in Orissa, to whom this can hardly be a choice, or have any meaning at all.

And there's the grave talk of the territorial integrity of India. But never of the integrity of the lives within India.

Because we so easily distract ourselves from what is really important in this country, the country is being undermined in the most insidious way of all: from inside, by the misery we have subjected our own people to.

So I wait, I wonder. I know why the politicians who wear the shining Hindutva cloak never speak of these things. You generate far less passion by asking for toilets than you do by asking for a mosque to be pulled down. Passion, don't we know, translates quite well into votes. That's an equation politicians like. They must do as their compulsions dictate.

But what about the others? The columnists, the email-pals, the activists, the letter-writers, the sympathisers who congregate on that other side of the fence? Why don't they raise the concerns that are utterly basic to the overwhelming majority of Indians?

There are two very simple answers to that question. One, that they just do not care about such concerns. Two, the Hindutva they profess, the Hinduism they are so eager to defend, does not care about these concerns either.

Which leads to this final little truth: theirs is really not Hindutva, not Hinduism. Because above all, those ideas must show us the way to improve lives. That's the only test that matters. In the form that they are on offer, there on that other side of the fence, they are failing it badly.

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