India explained: in sharp lines and sudden curves

While cartoons on Prophet Mohammed are provoking violence against some European nations, a fortnight back in a French town cartoons provoked...

While cartoons on Prophet Mohammed are provoking violence against some European nations, a fortnight back in a French town cartoons provoked what they ought to — a debate. In Carquefou, a small town off Nantes, after a good lunch on a wintry Sunday afternoon, men and women stepped out to listen to Indian cartoonists. At the seventh annual international press cartoon exhibition hosted by the town’s mayor, the focus was India. For a full hour and a half the crowd that spilled over to the aisles asked questions about a large gray area between the two things Indian they knew — a remarkable man called Gandhi and a pernicious social system called Caste.

Has India finally arrived? Are you in the midst of an economic boom? If so, would anything short of a miracle sustain it? Yet another miracle like your democracy that seems to work. Are you building a Shanghai or two leaving out the rural folks? Why aren’t you moving fast enough like China? Is your democracy a drag or will it turn out to be a stabilising economic value? How do unlettered women who walk miles for water and low-earning men who toil for hours line up every once in a while at polling stations to vote out governments? What have you got against the girl child? Because she is born with a cost called dowry?

Your kids don’t have enough schools and yet you run smart B-schools! Is yoga and spiritual wellness just touristy showpieces? In a land of high per-capita piety how do men suddenly turn violent, riot and kill? Is your justice system controlled and is the press censored? If the press is free enough to sting and the courts strong enough to act, why haven’t you caught and punished the Gujarat killers? With a growing young population born long after the subcontinent’s partition how many still hate Pakistan? Is the hate driven by politics? Internal? External? How come your large Muslim population isn’t exactly in love with theocracy? You have of all sorts a cartoonist who heads a political party and of all brands he stands for an illiberal politics!

Clearly, the audience had done its homework, thanks perhaps to Google. No wisdom dawned at the end of the session but people probed freely. Freely because they were addressing three Indian cartoonists, who could be trusted not to get touchy and defensive. The Indian cartoonist looks at the goings on here with an unkinder eye. One last questioner followed me to the cafe in the foyer. When the whole town on prams to wheelchairs turns up for an India event in France, he asked why none from the Indian mission is here? I told him the absence of government helps. How did the Indian IT Industry, which the French is gung-ho about, become what it is? IT made it when the government wasn’t looking.