Opinion Ways of moving on
Our main political parties are still figuring out how to mobilise a new India
Ayodhya season is upon us again. The timeless city,holy for Buddhists,Hindus and Muslims,whose amazing skyline and sunsets by the Sarayu river are the stuff of poetry,now awaits the verdict on title suits of the contentious portions of the land on Friday. The way everyone is reacting is as much a testament of how far things have moved on as of how they have not.
It would be useful to view this occasion to recount how much India has changed. First,along with the Mandal and Kamandal mobilisations in 1990-91,there was also the economic liberalisation that the Congress kicked off. Now,20 years on,liberalisation has left its imprint and continues to do so. It has freed up entrepreneurial energies,and also changed the balance between the organised and the unorganised workforces,with its own set of consequences. The expansion of the media and consumption patterns have been matched by new aspirations and preoccupations. A fascinating wishlist of the new India,documented somewhat cynically in Oye Lucky! Lucky Oye!,Love Sex aur Dhoka or even Peepli [Live,indicates the conundrum that this new India has come to mean. Imagery in India has always fascinated those with an eye for opposites (slums outside the Taj Gateway being a tired cliché) and the country has never failed to satisfy those looking for both,like Barbies and Harappan-style toys sold within miles of each other. But the change,the pace of the change and the desire for more change has led to a disconnect with traditional ways of doing things,including how people are socialised and mobilised.
Those in the BJP who would love to recapture the space that crumbled out of their grasp that simple Mandir-Masjid dichotomy are only reconciled to the mood being different at the moment. There has been no philosophical change or shift in their politics. There is constant evasion if you ask leaders now on what has changed from 1992 to now since promises to respect the law were made even then. The need to remain quiet given the exigencies of the elections in Bihar cannot always conceal the expectant glee of wondering what should be capitalised Hindu pride or a sense of injury,in case the verdict is otherwise.
The Congress has had a series of confessionals in the past two decades,one over Babri Masjid,then over their horrific treatments of Sikhs. In fact,it is the Congress that lost the most in this enterprise,as it even more cynically tried to do both one Shah Bano and then Ayodhya and unleashed forces it could not control. The fact that Narasimha Rao presided over the final levelling of the three domes was something they could not live down,till they finally purged him from the party pantheon. The decision to go for the Hindu vote was taken earlier but it was useful to make him the fall guy. Even today,there is a certain ambivalence about how the party seems to be approaching it a fear of a phenomenon that it happily acquiesced to some time back. Again,they offer phrases like moved on,not a new thought or confident expression of an idea.
The big question facing both the big parties is despite muttering on about keeping the law and order,is there any change in conviction or temperamental shift in how they undertake politics?
An apocryphal story is useful. Sitting with a bunch of Asian scholars at a London pub,a pretty Caucasian lady found herself being teased by some white blue-collared workers drinking nearby. They insisted she drink with them instead of with the browns. She tossed her head and told them she wouldnt move because they were too low-class. It effectively illustrates a bigger story about India,especially in recent times about how one kind of classification has often been tackled by raising other kinds of classifications. Religious fervour,which threatened to tear India apart,was dealt with by gently reminding Indians about caste (1991-92),and then,too much caste and religion were gotten over by groups raising the gender question (even if briefly,in the March vote in Rajya Sabha on the womens reservation bill).
In the early 20th century,there was the anti-colonial experience that served as the glue to bring all kinds of sensibilities together,and forge a sense of being one. It was a sense of being a citizen enforced by the relationship with a colonial state. After Independence,there were several waves of language,region intermittently,caste and religion mobilisations that,under the garb of uneven development,haunted our sense of being a nation. It was severely tested at times,especially in the early years. There were the language agitations in the 50s. In the 80s and 90s,caste erupted,not in a Brahmin versus non-Brahmin dynamic like in the south,but a sense of being powerful yet powerless among the OBCs convulsed north India. From the 80s on,religion dominated the discourse (sometimes parallel to caste and sometimes cutting across each other).
Now,post-liberalisation,a new India is growing up,with dreams and expectations of a much better material future. Old mores are being picked apart,for better and for worse. And political leaderships are struggling to find a framework to respond to these aspirations and frustrations. Perhaps forced by the 2009 general election,UPA-II did try and grope for language that could reconcile the hopes and the pitfalls of this 21st century India. But once the exigency of the polls was over,the we-have-at-least-two-theories-of-everything school of thought took over.
So whats changed? And why do we pose that question? When old wounds resurface,as they have on the Ayodhya issue,its almost like a refresher test for the citizenry and the Indian state in how it deals with such situations.
The verdict on Ayodhya is not yet out,and it is most likely to be contested. But whether new India,having moved on,has found a new kind of politics to take in its new concerns and preoccupations is likely to be tested this weekend and beyond.
seema.chishti@expressindia.com
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