A line from Iqbal

I remember one winter afternoon in Patna, in the early 1990s. The famous A.N. Sinha Institute of Social Studies had invited Singh for a talk. Backed by figures, he laced his scholarly speech with beautiful Urdu couplets. I, a history student, was enamoured more by the man than by his Manmohanomics.

That image came back to me when I saw Singh address the media at his home on Thursday. You cannot compare the thoughtful, gentle scholar with the rabble rousers dotting our political firmament. Singh can be anything but outrageously provocative. And that8217;s a handicap, given the vacuous nature of our politics. The more you scream, the better. Ask Sushma Swaraj. She raised a storm over Sonia Gandhi8217;s foreign origins, vowing to preserve India8217;s 8220;honour8221; even at the cost of losing her lustrous locks.

In the entire episode one didn8217;t see the moderate face of Hindutva, Atal Behari Vajpayee, anywhere. Nursing his zakhm wounds inflicted by the unpredictable Indian voter, the poet-patriarch silently watched the dance of jingoism being enacted in his backyard. The man whose oratory, to quote Pramod Mahajan, 8220;could resurrect even the dead8221;, chose to keep mum. The poet, who never tires of quoting Geeta naya main gata hoon, didn8217;t intervene while his party colleagues mounted an ugly, retrogressive campaign. But then didn8217;t Govindacharya call him the mukhauta mask of the party?

The saffron brigade argued that if Sonia became PM, it would 8220;humiliate8221; India8217;s glorious culture. Someone should put some very relevant questions to them. Was Bharatiyata honoured when a Sangh hardliner assassinated Mahatma Gandhi? Whose gaurav was it when Narendra Modi presided over the pogrom of Muslims in Gujarat? It hurts when the habitual haranguers lecture us about national honour.

Their campaign muddied the messages of Kabir, Raskhan, Tulsi Das, Baba Bhule Shah and Baba Farid. It put the poet Iqbal8217;s idea of India on its head. He had sung:8221;Meer-e-Arab ko aayee thandi hawa jahan se the leader of Arabia, Prophet Mohammed, got a gust of cool air from here8221;.

In that press conference, Singh reiterated India8217;s resilience, quoting Iqbal: Kutch baat hai ki hasti mit ti nahin hamari/sadiyon raha hai dushman daure jahan hamara There8217;s something that saves us from extinction/For centuries the world has been our enemy. That faith in the Indian spirit will help our prime minister designate tide over the tough times ahead.