| 07 March 2005 | Monday | 25 Muharram 1426 |
India's accident-prone tryst with democracy
If you see a group of people on classic motorcycles, like Triumph and Harley Davidson, at the beach on a weekend night, do not take them for another bunch of carefree guys. They are a dedicated and hard-working lot.
The shining motorcycles they proudly ride were manufactured decades back, some of them as far as the 1940s and 1950s, and finding their spare parts these days is a Herculean task. Yet they still look like and run better than those recently produced. But to make this happen, their owners have to invest a lot of time and labour into maintaining the motorcycles.
These motorcycle buffs visit Kabari Bazaar in Shershah once or twice a week to buy parts and purchase even those parts which are not immediately required as they may not be found in the market when needed. Almost all of them have become expert mechanics of motorcycles, though they pursue different professions.
Driving a vintage motorcycle is a lot of fun. The roar of their engine attracts the attention of everyone on the road and their high speed, some of them having as much as 900 horse power, coupled with their superb road grip is something worth experiencing.
Their owners vary in age, profession, social status and range from a Parsi priest to a machinist. Their hobby has made them a close-knit community. They are in constant communication with one another and share their experiences and know-how about maintaining the bikes. Most of them get together on weekends and once in a month make a journey to Thatta.
Occasionally, they go upcountry or ride to the Northern Areas. One of them wants to go to London on a Triumph of 1948.
The voice of peace
The India-Pakistan dialogue is taking place at various levels. And it is not simply talking, talking, talking, and more talking. There is a lot of action also involved. The most popular cooperative ventures are those in the cultural and sporting spheres. These days a visitor from across the border is Prasanna Ramaswamy who is directing the play Zikr-i-Nashunida which Sheema Kermani's Tehreek-i-Niswan will present on the occasion of the International Women's Day later this week.
This joint venture to send a message of peace - for that is what the play is all about - will make a great impact. It uses words, sounds, dance and movement to start a discourse with the audience. Ramaswamy, a simple non-assuming and friendly woman from Chennai, is remarkable in her ingenuity and skill in directing and writing the script.
Ramaswamy uses her art to campaign for peace. In 1999 when the war in Kargil took place and Indian television whipped up anti-Pakistan hysteria by bringing the war to the drawing rooms of people, this theatre director singlehandedly tried to neutralize the hatred by producing plays speaking of love and friendship.
But it has not been easy for her to reach the heights she finds herself at today. Born in an orthodox family, she was not allowed to study dance and drama, her first passions. Hence she studied English literature, "the respectable" thing to do.
When she came to Chennai after her marriage in 1975, Ramaswamy was thrown into close contact with the literary circle of the city. This was a well-knit group and her association with a playwright facilitated her entry into the world of theatre in the 1990s. After that it was sheer hard work - workshops and extensive travels all over India to watch new theatre plays, which inspired her.
Now she has nine full-length productions and several dramatized readings to her credit - the most acclaimed being Shadows of the Soul, Across the Seas, Listen to Me and Face of the Sun. Ramaswamy also conducts workshops on theatre for college students and Zikr-i-Nashunida is the outcome of a workshop she conducted in Karachi with Tehreek-i-Niswan last October.
Ramaswamy is excited about the India-Pakistan dialogue. "Peace and friendship is important at the people-to-people level. In a way it has always been there but now it can be expected to grow as the governments are also moving in that direction. I find the whole exercise very reassuring," she says.
As an artist she loves to create to give expression to her inner thoughts and to discover herself. "What I produce says quite a lot about what I want to reveal of myself," Prasanna Ramaswamy observes. "Theatre should bring an experience to the audience like music," she adds.
"It gives me courage when creating and it allows fearless participation to the audience," she says. She has found working with Sheema and her troupe a new experience. "It is the act of coming together - not just at the India-Pakistan level, but as human beings - that is such a rewarding exercise."
Long queues
Competition in education is now a fact of life. It has been brought home again by the long queues outside the gates of certain well-known schools in the city.
It is quite a sight. The queue starts at night, and one can find sleepy domestic servants waiting for the gates to open so that they can be handed an admission form for their employers' children. When the going gets too tough and in order to keep their place in the queue, they are invariably replaced by another battalion from the same household. Many times, circumstances call upon the lady of the house herself to sacrifice her beauty sleep and stand in line so that she can secure her child's future by 9am the next day.
Whiling away their time by counting the stars or shivering as an unexpected gust of wind merrily swirls about them, this motley bunch must wait, bleary eyed, for hours on end before the magic portals let them in and allow them to go home with their prize.
Isn't there a simpler way of doing this? Can't the admission papers be simply mailed in prepaid, self-addressed envelopes to the "first-arrived", first-served applications? Or alternatively, can't some arrangements be made so that the forms can be given out in a disciplined manner when parents or others come to collect them, without forcing them to turn up at some outlandish hour of the night?
The point is that there must be some way of streamlining the process so that it does not cause so much inconvenience. After all, members of the school administration are not the only ones who have to work the next day.
Bare minimum
Karachi may be a modern city, but perhaps even the most fashionable people had not realized exactly how modern it is until they witnessed a fashion show recently. Strictly limited to ladies only - Tariq Amin -was the only male conspicuous by his presence - the fashion show had the bold and beautiful of the city strutting about in imported undergarments and lingerie. Showcasing the product range available at a newly opened lingerie store, the fashion extravaganza was a definite first for the city and an eye-opener in more ways than one.
Unique as the concept was, and well executed one may add, it was fascinating to note that most models sashayed down the poolside in a bare minimum of clothes with remarkable aplomb.
But one couldn't help noting that many of our trim and slim models can do with some body toning. Unlike in the West, where it is customary for figure-conscious people to be regularly working out, and absolutely imperative for models, the stress here seems to be more on dieting than on exercising. Thus, even the thinnest of the lot had her fair share of cellulite to contend with.
As expected, photography was strictly prohibited, so much so that all mobile phones were taken by the organizers.
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India's accident-prone tryst with democracy
It could have easily passed for an amusing irony had the circumstances not been tragic, even ominous.
Professor John Keane of the University of Westminster was speaking last week in Delhi about the ancient grassroots democratic tradition of India, possibly comparable in time with ancient Greece.
Even as the learned professor was lauding the historical role of India in fostering democracy through many a challenging century, some typically murky political events were unfolding in Bihar, Jharkhand, Goa and Haryana, all important states, all trying to set up new governments by patently unfair means.
India, so spoke Prof. Keane, had successfully shored up a dying democratic tradition also more recently when totalitarianisms of different varieties all but destroyed parliamentary democracy in Europe by about 1945.
"The credit for its rejuvenation goes to the lonely experiment in India under Jawaharlal Nehru's leadership."
Tall claim. Felt good. But, looking out of the seminar window, how were we to explain the totalitarian threat stalking the world in the garb of democracy today, in Iraq or Gujarat, for example? How should we explain the murder of smaller democracies by the biggest democracy, keeping the examples of Allende and Mosaddegh in mind? What about the neo-fascist threat in Nehru's India itself?
This is where the insidious sub-text of the political turmoil in the four states, three of them the result of inconclusive poll verdicts, becomes chilling.
The BJP has ruled Jharkhand since its inception, and now the February polls booted it out. A similar inconclusive verdict showed the door to Railway Minister Lalu Prasad Yadav's party, which had ruled Bihar for around 15 years.
While in Jharkhand the BJP returned as the single largest party, in Bihar it was Mr. Yadav's Rashtriya Janata Dal that came first. According to the rules that brought in the first Vajpayee government in 1996, the BJP should have been asked to form a government in Jharkhand, while giving a similar opportunity to Mr. Yadav in Bihar.
After all in 1996, Mr. Atal Behari Vajpayee was made prime minister on the grounds that the BJP had got 179 seats, emerging as the largest group in parliament but with no hope of getting any support from the others. But that election had for the first time left the Congress behind as a poor second with just 140 MPs.
Not too many want to remember this figure because of its links with Narasimha Rao-Manmohan Singh team's much touted economic reforms, a holy cow as it were. In fact few want to recall that since 1996 the Congress tally in the Lok Sabha, with or without Sonia Gandhi, has hovered just over 140, not once crossing 145 in the 543-member lower house.
Thus the seriousness of the Hindutva challenge to the Congress-led secular coalition has become a strangely masked fact, a truly menacing fact. We could glean it from the figures of last year's general election. The BJP got 138 seats, but the Congress did not get too many more - just 145.
At a time when the burgeoning Indian middle class wants to be told about the glorious democratic traditions of India and about the vibrancy of its electoral system, as Prof. Keane observed, it would seem callous to spoil the party.
Yet it serves no purpose at all to hide the fact that India is perhaps the only democracy in the world where elected representatives are hidden by their leaders in pokey hotel rooms out of the reach of civilization, because the opposition could poach them.
Aircraft were grounded and searched by politicians in Jharkhand in the hunt for some missing unattached deputies whose help was needed by both sides. One deputy was paraded before the president of India in an ambulance because he was too sick to raise his hand in support of anyone. And so he blinked his eyes. And yet this buffoonery is not where the threat to India's secular democracy seems to come from. After all the biggest loser of them all was the one who had stalled BJP president Lal Kishan Advani's chariot ride to Ayodhya. Lalu Yadav, then chief minister of Bihar, also remains the only leader after Indira Gandhi to arrest Mr Advani.
Much of the threat to the Congress and also to the Indian state really lies in the BJP's ability to convert an adverse situation into an ideological asset to shore up Hindutva.
Take the example of a little-discussed cartoon drawn by the BJP to depict the farce played out in Jharkhand. The caricature published on BJP's website shows Syed Sibte Razi, the state's governor, torching the voluminous Indian constitution.
Mr Razi had evidently unfairly installed in Jharkhand a pro-Congress government supportive of the Congress, the party to which he once belonged.
But the BJP's caricature was crafted with another purpose. It showed a picture of Dr B.R. Ambedkar on the cover of the constitution and it depicted the governor in the attire of a north Indian Muslim. Ambedkar who is regarded as the main author of the constitution was a Dalit, and here a Muslim governor was seen burning his book, the constitution of India, to cinders.
This is the way fascist propaganda works. This is the way Dalits and tribes-people, the Adivasis, were used in Gujarat to target Muslims and Christians. This is the way Hindutva groups such as the BJP and Vishwa Hindu Parishad have been using the divisive approach elsewhere too, including in Jharkhand.
The strategy works at two levels. Since Dalits and Muslims were the bulwark of the Congress for many years, dividing their ranks and keeping them in a state of mistrust tackles the key objective of keeping the Congress perpetually weakened.
At another level, the ploy to pit Dalits and Adivasis against Christians and Muslims injects animus, which can be converted at will into a controlled bloodbath at the lower levels of the Hindu society by targeting the minorities as main quarry. This eminently suits the purposes of Hindutva fascism.
It aims to not only blood new storm troopers at the lower levels of India's varied hoi polloi, it also enables the movement to spare upper crust leaders the need to do the dirty work. Hindutva needs a clean image for the likes of Atal Behar Vajpayee. But everyone is too busy tarring the face of the Congress and Sonia Gandhi to notice that.
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We have all heard many hilarious versions of George W. Bush jokes. People like Michael Moore had turned it into a fine art to evoke a hearty laughter from their understated but extremely snide wit. Last week Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez came up with a new one. At a news conference in Delhi, which he turned into a Fidel Castro-like lecture against global imperialism and the need to fight the likes of President Bush, he said: "His lies about Iraq were like the man who came home with his face covered with lipstick marks and who told his wife that he had been kissed at the circus by the clown."