Prompters

Prompters

Autocratic Islamic governments are being challenged on their city streets and squares. But unfortunately, the protests are underpinned by religion, the only vehicle of mass mobilisation that even Islamic dictators, their armies and secret police can’t stamp out.

President Hosni Mubarak’s final moment of reckoning could come after any week’s Friday prayers now; or perhaps on a week day as soon as the US brokers his departure on terms acceptable to itself. He won’t lose his life in the bargain only if he retreats to his billions abroad like his son and heir who has preceded him.

There is little hope nevertheless that regime change in compact Tunisia, followed perhaps by Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Palestine; even Saudi Arabia, will lead to anything other than interim governments very much like the ones they replace. Eventually, after further public discontent,  there will be Mullah-led or inspired radical Islamic regimes like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Regimes with harsh, repressive, anti-modern ways;  particularly towards women. These will be overtly puritanical, extreme governments, long on rhetoric, short on civilised law and order, based, first and last, on the anachronistic Sharia’h laws.

Depressingly, it makes little difference whether the revolutions take place in Shia or Sunni majority countries, in under-populated or populous ones, or indeed in this decade, or the last, or even the one before that. It is hard to deal with an all-embracing secular and temporal religious system stuck in another time zone. Democracy, as we know it, the Grecian spawned ideal, is not for Arabia, because it has no ideological place or appeal in the Arab psyche. This despite the fond hopes entertained to this effect in the West.

Meanwhile, democratic we Indians may be, but as we grapple with our inequities against a backdrop of a betrayal of governance, we seem to fall, temperamentally speaking, into two alternative heaps. Akin to dirty laundry on the floor, both heaps await a cleansing and washing hand. A clean hand wielding ample soft-soap and a muscular mangle perhaps? But can the hand that symbolises our hoary, if lost to itself, Congress Party deliver this?

Some of us fantasise, with a saccharine sweetness about a caring, sharing world. Others want to invoke purifying, fiery, Shaivite forces.  Both temperaments however, are bewildered and beguiled at their lack of success. Alas, both may be missing the woods for the trees.

The sweetness and light ones tend to be liberal, left-leaning souls, out to see the positive on the part of those they favour, ever-ready to sympathise with the marginalised, refugee influxes, endangered species, threatened environments, and most lost causes. They have no idea about how to square a circle, but are nevertheless implacably suspicious of the State and its motives, and only a little less hostile to big business.

The other ones, who dramatically seek bolts of devastating lightning to obliterate their enemies are seemingly made of sterner stuff. They are right-wingers, often embarrassingly patriotic, with a devil-take-the-hindmost approach to social justice. They believe in results, more or less at any cost and think “action” is the answer.

But all of this has really been about the general public, the electorate, civil society, the peasantry, the urban masses and others, the broad hordes that constitute, as the late great jurist Nani Palkhivala liked to call it; We, the People.

The rulers of India, on their part, fancy themselves as realists. But what comes disconcertingly to mind are the oblivious Nawabi Chess Players in Shatranj Ke Khilari even as the Red Coats march right into the Kingdom of Awadh.

This kind of “realism” comes naturally to people ensconced in the power structure; politicians, but also captains of industry and commerce. This world-view tends to be totally amoral and cravenly opportunistic, though well disguised in platitudes of concern and responsibility. Such realists are not perturbed by chaos. They don’t mind pollution either for the wonderful smokescreen it provides. Such people love weak governance with its lack of accountability and excellent opportunities for intrigue, manipulation, subversion and corruption. 

But surely, at bottom, this degenerate cynicism is both short-sighted and self-destructive? And also sad, because the short-term rapaciousness will have to be paid for with economic, if not sovereign enslavement; the more ironic, because India is on the very cusp of becoming one of the two or three leading world economies.

It is as if a degenerate clique given to sharp manoeuvres, have taken for granted the juggernaut of near double-digit growth in GDP on auto-pilot. They are simply looting because they can. Looking on from the margins, the corruption and brazen disregard for integrity is a virus that some very important people are decidedly immune to, while the same blight sorely tests the rest of us.

This may however make for very fertile conditions for the forces of implosion. We cannot afford to be smug, thinking this is not Egypt. But when civil order breaks down due to the force of widespread public foment, then bullets in their plenitude have never proved to be sufficient.

In India, we might well be on the razor’s edge. Termites of disregard are chomping hard at the foundations, whittling away at our institutions and constitutional structures, devouring our strengths relentlessly. There are, in addition, many daggers pointed at the very heart of our 62 year-old republic.

Our larger neighbours, China and Pakistan, are actively involved in fanning the flames with money, including counterfeit money; arms; training; encouragement; and propaganda.  Our smaller neighbours too have been suborned into the process with  noxious conduitry leading in from Nepal and Sri Lanka. Countries in our geographic orbit too like Myanmar and those in the Indian Ocean have been compromised against us.

But, the worst part is that we are increasingly proving that we are more than capable of doing much worse to ourselves. We are unmindful of the dangers just like the erstwhile USSR, long our mentor, was. So even as the world order changes in favour of Asia, India is far from ready to tryst with its Nehruvian destiny. Its powers that be, clad sometimes in ironic white Gandhi caps, are focussed on plunder and depravity yoked to narrow, self-serving advantage.

The point is, at this rate, we may not have the ability to seize tomorrow when tomorrow eventually comes; being too debauched and debased, like Sarat Chandra’s Devdas, to reach out to our glorious inheritance.    

(1,058 words)

Friday, 4^th February, 2011

Gautam Mukherjee