But they are ours...!

‘Yahya maybe a bastard but he is our bastard’.

A supposed comment made by the US President, Richard Nixon, when the facts of the Pakistani army’s war against the Hindus and Awami League supporters in East Pakistan became known.

To the genteel, such comments may seem horrifying, particularly when this b****** was committing a genocide in East Pakistan. However, what gets missed is that even if in varying degrees, each one of us is blessed / cursed with such sentiments. For one, parents are supposed to be oblivious to shortcomings of their children, friends are supposed to stand up for each other even when in wrong. After all, what are bonds if they are so weak that they cannot stand the strain of some human frailty!

Yet, human culture celebrates as heroic those acts, where actions and their consequences are weighed for their intrinsic worth. Those instances where a mother overcomes her maternal instincts to turn over a renegade progeny aka real life Mother Indias, where a wife kills her husband for his crimes, where one overcome your patriotism and attempt to kill a monster aka Count Stauffenberg, are stuff which legends are made of. The very fact such instances are few indicate that ordinary humans find it easier to turn a blind eye or rationalize acts which seem condemnable when committed by others.

Very soon after the Indian National Congress (not the current namesake but the vanguard of National struggle for Independence) had tasted power in the provinces, it was clear to both the leaders and the general public that the Indian office bearers were not very different when compared to their British counterparts as far as arrogance and a proclivity to enjoy the fruits the fruits of power were concerned. In fact, many of the office bearers saw no harm in using their new found powers to indulge in acts which even in the politest forms, would be called acts of nepotism and corruption. While these developments dismayed Gandhi, other leaders with a high moral quotient and the general public, there was little which they could do. At one level, there wasn’t any alternative to the INC and probably even more importantly, condemning the rogue acts would have been an admission that their beliefs in greatness of their leaders was misplaced.

Such trends continued and with hardening of political identities, party supporters very frequently find themselves indulging in all sorts of reasoning theatrics in attempting to defend the indefensible. This does not necessarily mean that all these supporters have a misbalanced sense of the right and the wrong. The reason could be as mundane as one’s perception of lack of better alternatives, belief in a particular ideology or a probably a deeper instinct of self preservation which makes people unwilling to accept that they had made bad choices. However, the ability of a human being to condone faults and overlook mistakes being limited, it does not take long before a vocal defence makes way for a sullen indifference.

For those who supported the Hindu Mahasabha, the RSS, the Jana Sangh and even the Swatantra Party, BJP’s ascendancy to power was seen as culmination of a decades long struggle. Hence, all these people who supported this political stream with all their might even in years when it had no chance to come to power, were willing to condone a tactical stepping back on those issues which made the BJS/RSS/BJP different from all the other options available in the market. However, which each passing blunder – Tehelka arms sting, the Kandhar hijack, China border agreement give-away, the erstwhile unalloyed support started giving way to convoluted reasoning, chiefly around a comparative logic – ‘Just look at the Congress, they are much worse’. What happens when such logic is stretched to the extremes? You start resembling the one you despise.

Most of the time, exceptional performance in the field of arts, sciences and sports are not a result of a breakthrough but of incremental improvements – a tweak here, a betterment there. It is the collective impact of all minor but continuous improvements spread over a period of time, that differentiate the exceptional from the ordinary.

What holds true for incremental improvements, holds equally true for decremental changes too. A compromise here, a mis-step there, a blunder at yet another occasion – all these together ensure that your USP is lost. The same way, the six year old Vajpayee government, though better in relative sense (vis-à-vis the current dispensation), came to be seen as a Congress clone. The result was a silent disassociation of its core support base and loss of its innate appeal to its natural constituency – the youth, the middle and the intermediate classes.

What we are seeing today is a manifestation of the same phenomenon. The AAP surge was powered by the youth, inspired by its promise to fight corruption. Today, the party is seen to have started adopting those very practices which it stood against – pandering to communal and casteist emotions, tokenism, readiness to grab loaves of office, willingness to compromise with corruption etc. The very vocal volunteers, who have invested so much in making the party a success, are even more vocally defending the party against criticism. The point is – for how long? AAP is running the risk of diluting its core plank of corruption and be seen as another clone of the Congress. If only its supporters realize even if the transgressing b****** is our b******, some course correction is required, for its own good and for the greater good of the country!

Maid, Diplomacy and Nationhood

With the Khobragade affair having had its moments under the sun for quite an extended period, it is unlikely that any further development in the case will be highlighted in the way her arrest was.

The facts of the case are pretty simple. An Indian diplomat was arrested for a crime, which by no stretch of imagination, can be considered so grave as to warrant the arrest. For once, the habitual anti-US jholawallahs were right in denouncing the US for its hypocrisy.  The US extends the principal of diplomatic immunity to a CIA agent who murders two people in Pakistan and to a Kenya based diplomat who kills people through rash driving, but declines it to the Indian diplomat on the spurious ground of the immunity being limited to ‘consular duties’.  This is duplicity enough. Period.

While commentators sympathetic to the current Government have gone ga-ga over its supposed muscular response in form of removing security barricades and withdrawing airport privilege passes, the issue has rent the curtain on many a disturbing practices and huge faultlines in public opinion.

If diplomatic relations are based on the principle of reciprocity, why exactly are the US and many other embassies offered such benefits which are not available to their Indian counterparts? The Indian Embassy in US does not even have a reserved car park forget about security barricades. Our ambassador, ex-president and serving ministers are patted down while even the family members of the US diplomatic staff seem to carry non-photographed transferrable security passes which allow them access to even restricted areas of our airports. They are allowed to run provision stores, import provisions and liquor duty free while our diplomats have none of these benefits. So, why and when did we start extending these ‘courtesies’ to those who do not reciprocate? Is it because, as some foreign affairs observers have suggested, that our establishment has huge interests in pandering to American policy makers – for Ivy League seats and plush jobs, green cards, citizenship etc for their children and their willingness to turn a blind eye to their money laundering activities from India? Even in the Khobragade affair, this lady is married to a US citizen.  A diplomat is expected to work for her country and place its interests first. How can a person, even if of impeccable integrity, be seen as working in an independent manner when her spouse is a citizen of the country she has to deal with? How was she even deputed to that country?

So far as our muscular response is concerned, how exactly does withdrawal of additional benefits count as reciprocal reaction? Maybe, it only requires a state dinner for some minister and all these benefits would be restored again!

India must be the only country in this world which has mutely stood by when its Diaspora has been trampled upon by much lesser Nations. In the last 65 years, Indians were expelled or made to leave many countries – Burma, Ceylon, Uganda, Tanzania, Kenya, Fiji, but each time our response was either empty bluster or stony silence. We are a Nation where even the highest court of the land does not find anything amiss in allowing white-skinned murderers to be released so that they can celebrate Christmas at home! When China transgresses and eats up our territory slowly, our only response is to pretend that such events never happened. Next we know, our Prime Ministers and Foreign Ministers are falling our backwards to give more and more concessions to China. At the time then the NDA was in power, Colin Powell visited Delhi before landing in Islamabad to declare Pakistan a major non-NATO ally. He did not deem it important enough to inform the Indians of the impending declaration. Surprise, surprise – rather than the US trying to explain on why this piece of information was missed, we had the spectacle of Indian ministers and officials trying to drum up excuses for the US.

Is it any wonder that we get treated the way we are?

Unlike in past events where International slights had served to unite public opinion, the general reaction to Ms Khobragade’s arrest has been mixed. A large section of people seem to believe that the diplomat got her just desserts. Some have questioned the riches obtained by the diplomat and her father, seemingly much above their known sources of income, and see her arrest as karma. Many posts on social networking sites speak of the snootiness of the bureaucracy and how those who believed they were above the law, have been justly brought down to the ground.

Such comments are unfortunate for they do not talk of the same issue. The diplomat here is an official representative of India and her ill-treatment is, in many ways is symptomic of the host Nation’s contempt for India itself. The point on the individual belonging to a class which is seen as being haughty, corrupt and disdainful of law is a different issue altogether. Yet, if the general public is moving towards divorcing its identity from the artefacts of the Indian Nationhood, we are heading for much more disturbing times.

Only a couple of centuries back, western historians had noted with bewilderment, the indifference of the Indian peasant to his rulers.  In battle after battle, they would see the Indian peasants going around their daily routine, tilling their land, grazing their cattle, only miles away from the battlefield where the native forces were getting worsted. This state of affairs had come along for the Aam Aadmi of those days had recognised the rulers for what they were –a self indulgent, corrupt and parasitic lot. It hardly mattered to them if the name of that ruler changed. It was in this context that Goswami Tulsidas had commented – ‘Raja bhaye koi, hamra ki hani’, i.e., whosoever is the ruler, what difference does it make to my plight?

Maybe these are too early days and hopefully, our sense of Nationhood is more robust. But still, it would do good if the ruling classes understand that if the distance between the rulers and the ruled increases too much, there generally comes a day where there is nothing left to rule.