Do as the Romans do

Back to the point now, the performing and non-performing ministers: Civil aviation, agriculture, textiles, railways, coal and mines, have all seen disasters of the kind we had not seen in any Congress or even Third Front government. One that tried to do something with power was thrown out by Balasaheb for refusing to learn the Maratha equivalent of political khamgiri. The way things are now going, the disasters of civil aviation, agriculture and textiles will soon be put in the shade by the most confused and waffling incumbent the ministry of information and broadcasting has seen in a very long time. I, for one, am even inclined to be nostalgic for the days of C.M. Ibrahim. At least you knew his heart was in the right place, such as it was.

Another exceptional performer in this mess is Surface Transport Minister B.C. Khanduri. His highways may be off-deadline, but they will be there in a couple of years. They will be better than any we have seen in our country and this grey revolution will change our quality of life as nothing else has since the green revolution. He will also be remembered for running one of the cleanest private infrastructure-building campaigns ever in a system where not even a 6-ft culvert is usually expected to be built without a kickback.

Mercifully, however, Khanduri has got his due. A promotion to cabinet rank, wide popular acclaim and once his highways are up they will forever be remembered as the gift he enabled the prime minister to give the nation. In an entirely different category is another minister who has delivered, in spite of so little political backing, in an area considered so un-sexy and so lightweight in our political worldview. Poor Jagmohan has done more for our heritage and tourism than five ministers before him. Yet nobody has sung his praises yet, his party high command has summarily pushed him around at the beckoning of three so-called senior leaders in Delhi who, collectively, are such a curse on the Capital. They had him removed from urban affairs because they thought his clean-up campaign will lose them the municipal corporation election. They insulted the intelligence of the people of Delhi and were routed. They will now be thrashed again in the assembly where Sheila Dikshit may be the only Congress chief minister to defy the anti-incumbency factor because we, in the Capital, widely believe she has improved the quality of our lives. You can imagine how much better things would have been for us if she had done this hand-in-hand with an aware and activist minister like Jagmohan rather than with one who will be noted by historians as having doled out more free land than Vinoba Bhave — though only to his own.

But unmindful of the humiliation and frustrations, Jagmohan, has carried on. His wish to clean up the Ajanta and Ellora is of historic significance. His activist intervention has now saved Taj Mahal from being reduced to a Ghaziabad style multiplex. Even the cleaning up of Humayun’s tomb in Delhi will make us rediscover a monument we had forgotten all about. But you haven’t heard anybody in the BJP singing his praises. What you hear, instead, is rubbish like, Jagmohanji is a very good person but doesn’t know politics. That is why he has been given tourism where he can do the least damage. It is unbelievable how contemptuously a party which is building its entire politics on constructing a temple, treats somebody who has been trying to restore and preserve our heritage — mostly religious as elsewhere in the world.

This article is not being written after a meal with Jagmohan in India International Centre. I haven’t even seen him in months. This is being written, instead, on board a plane flying over the Alps, after a week’s vacation in a country our textbooks will perhaps describe as Soniadesh if a Murli Manohar Joshi or some Narendra Modi type gets another shot at power. Italy’s real economic muscle comes not from its cuisine, its agriculture, hi-fashion designers or even the mafia. It comes, instead, from the truly magnificent way it has preserved its heritage. Every bit of a crumbling old wall has been saved and used. There were fancy shops and restaurants inside old buildings which would have been in ruins if not commercially exploited, old lanes and streets have been laid bare of the asphalt that some misguided rulers may have covered them with to expose the old bricks and cobble-stones. Preserving heritage is in and, at the same time, a tribute to your ancestors and gods as well as a most profitable investment in your future.

Italy, a nation of nearly six crore people, now gets eight crore tourists in a year. Compare it with the 30-odd lakh (that is, counting every airline crew member who walks past immigration at our airports) that we, a nation of a hundred crore people, 3,000 years of civilisation, diversity, history and culture, are able to attract. True, you can go around the world but won’t find anything to rival the majesty of the 1000-year-old brick walls of Siena, the architectural excess of Florence, the picture-postcard magic of the waterways of Venice or the sheer hedonistic charm of the limestone island of Capri — remember where James Bond’s gizmo-laden car jumped into the sea off a cliff in Die Another Day? My cellphone rests in the Mediterranean somewhere there now, tossed out of my hand in a bouncy boat.

But India has delights no Italy or Egypt or China could rival. Except even we know so little about them. It is difficult to get there, tougher to survive and, yes, if you wait too long, they may not be there forever. Forget foreigners, how many Indians have seen Hampi? How many even know how to get there? The Sun Temple at Konark? How awful are the arrangements to even visit the Taj Mahal. We can’t seem to get even a sufficient number of decent-sounding electric scooters to drive around the Taj Trapezium. The truly ancient, and serene, Shiva temples of Mahabalipuram have excreta strewn around them. So do the unique palaces and temples of Orchcha in Madhya Pradesh.

If India has to live up to its claim of being a truly great civilisational state, it has to take care of its culture and heritage better. Our tragedy is two-fold. First, we confuse heritage with religious politics. Second, we confuse tourism with foreign airlines’ landing rights. The result is, our government does not have a tourism policy but an Air-India policy and what that has done to both we well know. In three more years, Maldives, with a population less than that of Ghaziabad or Ghatkopar, will be counting more foreign tourists than India. In the same period, little Emirates will be carrying nearly 20 (I repeat twenty) times more passengers than Air-India. It is time, therefore, that the BJP began to take its most unsung minister a bit more seriously. However it may detest Italy for allegedly seeking to reinvent the Roman Empire by infiltrating Sonia into the Gandhi family, on preserving heritage and building tourist infrastructure, it would be useful to learn a thing or two from the Italians. They, after all, seem to be the only rich European nation happily importing — and driving — Bajaj Chetaks and Maruti Suzukis.

Readers are invited to join a debate on whether India is fair to its heritage and what else could be done to preserve it and to promote tourism better. A selection of the responses will be published and a larger version posted on our website http://www.expressindia.com. You can write to sg@expressindia.com.