Fifty years of forgetting

Both Houses had resolved to give the people of thenation a higher quality of life: the minimum needs of food, health security at the household level, potable water, sanitation and shelter. I concede that one year is too short a period to achieve all this. But a beginning could have been made. Instead, never has the status of an average person been as bad since independence as it is now.

Lofty words apart, Parliament has not even been able to maintain, as it said in a resolution, the inviolability of the question hour. Nor has it reached a consensus on stopping members from transgressing into official areas of the House or from shouting slogans. The Lok Sabha witnessed in the last session the forcible snatching of official papers from even the Speaker.

Surely MPs could have ensured that such behaviour does not manifest itself. Is this the participatory democracy that the National Agenda spoke about? What should people, who saw the scene live on TV, infer? Can political life and processes ever be purged of the presence of undesirable elements, includingrank criminals? Or will bribery and the murder of the innocent through false encounters continue with impunity?

Yet it was a different India that I visualised when I crossed over from Pakistan in August 1947. I was then 23. There was a naive belief that all ills will disappear overnight because India was for Indians now. The problem of underdevelopment and poverty would find an easy, if not instantaneous, solution. I imagined that Indepen-dence would free us from hunger, want and ignorance. It was a strange mixture of over-enthusiasm, over-confidence and over-expectation. True, there was an over-emphasis on past glory but there was also a fervour, and willingness, to build a new country.

I recall that the first thing I did after reaching India was to travel to Delhi to have Mahatma Gandhi’s darshan. I wanted to see him in person, the man who had not only won us freedom but had given us dignity. When I was in school in Sialkot, now in Pakistan, a white man had caned me because I was part of a procession toagitate against British rule. Gandhiji had made me feel equal to that white man.

When I reached Birla House, Gandhiji was pacing up and down a verandah. I did not go near him. My purpose was only to see him so that I could tell my children and grandchildren that I actually saw Gandhiji. He looked so lonely. Forcibly ousted from Pakistan, the Punjabis were angry with him.

Some had even met him to give him a piece of their mind. But, for me, it was a pilgrimage. I attended his prayer meetings where quotations from the Gita, the Quran and the Bible were recited. At one meeting, a young man objected to the recitation of the Quran. Gandhiji said that he would not continue prayers until the person concerned withdrew his objection. The young man did, because his anger was like a complaint to a much-loved father.Now when I hear that Godse is being glorified, I know how far we have traversed from the path shown by Gandhiji. I never thought that anybody in free India would honour Gand-hiji’s assassin. But then Ihad never imagined that those who traded in the name of religion would one day be our rulers. I have seen so much blood and violence in the name of religion that religion itself has become an anathema. What has happened in the past 50 years is that the values of religion have been pushed into the background and its fundamentalistic aspect has come to the fore.

I had pictured new India without religious or caste animosity, that nobody would be killed because he belonged to a minority community. I must admit failure. The Srikrishna report on the Mumbai killings and Shiv Sena chief Bal Thac-keray’s unrepentance bear testimony to our defeat. That we have not been able to establish the kind of polity that I thought we would is becoming clearer by the day. I could see even in the ’70s our faults and follies and how the country was compromising with communalism and casteism.When I met the late Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan in Afghanistan, I found how low India had fallen from the standard its leaders had set for it. Heasked me if it was true that there were still communal riots in India. My reply in affirmative pained him. How could it happen in the land of Gandhi? They had imagined that once the British left, Hindu-Muslim differences would disappear. What struck me the most about him was his austere living. All that he had in the hutment were two salwars and a kameez spread on a string and a few utensils. He radiated idealism. He was like Gandhiji, who prescribed simple living and high thinking. He was the man who during the independence movement had earned the title of Frontier Gandhi.

I recall Gandhiji posing the question after the bombs were thrown on Hiroshima and Nagasaki: “Should we put an end to human race or shall mankind give up bombs?” Today the bomb has become the symbol of greatness. Those who denounce it are anti-national. Patriotism and the bomb have become synonymous. We are told that deterrence worked during the Cold War. But this was a great illusion because the two blocs into which the world wasdivided spent billions on the arms race.

Gandhiji wanted us to be light unto the nations. How do we revive the world’s faith that we are a principled nation? We have deteriorated so much. Today when I travel through the country, Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis comes back to me. In it he portrays the dehumunisation of man. We, particularly the middle classes, have lost our values and, above all, character. Nothing moves us gruesome violence or abject poverty. We have lost the capacity to differentiate between right and wrong, moral and immoral, true and false. We have ceased to be sensitive. It is as if we have become robots, without feelings, without pangs of conscience and without any will to change our condition.