Politics of Aggrandisement

GANAPATI FESTIVAL: I have nothing against the MPs who have prevailed upon the government to curtail parliament's session by three days. My worry is over the cause for which they have done so. This is for the Ganapati festival, associated with warrior Chhatrapati Shivaji, and celebrated mainly at Mumbai.

At a time when religious, caste or regional identities are increasingly taken for nationalism, the assertion of parochialism is nothing new.

Yet, I do not think that the Ganapati festival should have had precedence over important problems awaiting parliament's attention. It does not send the right type of message across the country which is incensed over the spread of terrorism and rising prices.

Still more reprehensible is that no MP, not even anyone from the Congress Party, raised the question of recalling the Quit India day _ August 9 _ now entering its 65th anniversary. The session, I believe, is being suspended on that day not to commemorate the Quit India movement but to celebrate Raksha Bandhan festival.

Both Quit India day and the Ganapati festival fall in the same month of August and have Mumbai as their home. The difference between the two is that the first represents the non-violent struggle for independence and the second, the conquest by sword. One is pluralistic in content while the other is sectarian in appeal. MPs should have got it right.

The new generations should remember that on August 9 began a movement which, no doubt, rose and fell but culminated in an avalanche that swept off the 150-year-old foreign rule. It was such a heady atmosphere of self-confidence and dignity on that day that thousands in Mumbai dared the British to shoot.

Hundreds of people sacrificed their lives. The Union Jack was hauled down and the country heroically faced the ruthless oppression by the government.

The Ganapati festival has its importance but it cannot match the significance of Quit India movement, the triumph of the common Indian over the armed action of the British. So afraid was London of people's discontent that it sent Lord Stafford Cripps, a leading minister a few months before the movement, to win India's support to the war efforts.

But he was equivocal about its future status. Both the Congress and the Muslim League, the two main political parties, rejected the Cripps offer because it did not even promise freedom after the war.

America was a different country those days, both in tone and tenor. Having won freedom from the British forcibly, the US wanted India to cast off the English rule. Winston Churchill stuck to his imperialist policy of sustaining the empire. However, President Roosevelt did not relent and saw to it that India became free. (The Congress thanked Roosevelt through a letter).

For those who still regret the division of India, I can only say the Cripps mission provided an opportunity if the British had been willing to ladle out more powers. Both the Congress and the Muslim League might have come together to run the government at that time.

After all, Cripps had conceded that the states could be autonomous, the kernel of the demand for Pakistan. He had also suggested that the Congress and the Muslim League could sort out their differences after independence.

When Cripps returned to the UK, he said that his mission failed because of the criticism of "Hindu press." The comment betrayed the same imperialistic game of divide and rule. Even a liberal person like Cripps could not resist the temptation of using the stock argument that the differences between Hindus and Muslims had kept India enslaved.

The fact is that Cripps tried to reconcile the aspirations of people for independence with his limited brief: Indians could replace the whites in the Viceroy's council. That was not adequate.

My purpose is not to hark back on those days but to tell people that they have not appreciated the importance of August 9 as they should have.

That day began the journey towards freedom which ended in the mid-August 1947. Even the founder of Pakistan, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, repudiated the theory of religion determining the nationality. Hindus and Muslims were either Indians or Pakistanis, he said, and religion should not be mixed with politics.

Post-independent religious factions and innate differences among the political parties have of late been occupying the centre stage and pushing out in the process the national struggle's ethos: pluralism and democracy. In today's world, there is no place for religiosity or for the system which denies people the right to rule themselves.

The purport of the Quit India movement and similar stirs was that violence cannot possibly lead to a solution of the problem. Violence produces an atmosphere of conflict and of disruption. It sets into motion a chain of events which harm people and divert their attention from real issues.

The much-needed time _ and money _ is frittered away and the real task of building the country is clouded. That is what is happening in South East Asia.

The Naxalites in India, the Maoists in Nepal, the LTTE in Sri Lanka and the fundamentalists in Bangladesh have not yet realised how outdated they are in their thinking and action. Their violence is not only unproductive but it also does an irreparable damage to the cause they claim to be serving. It is absurd to imagine that out of a conflict, the socially progressive forces are bound to win.

Adolf Hitler defeated both the Communist Party and the Social Democrats at the polls in Germany. Whatever we may think about effecting changes in the region or, for that matter, the world we have arrived at a stage where any attempt to impose ideas or points of view through violence is bound to fail. This is as true of Israel as of Hizbollah even though the former is more powerful and more provocative.

Those who want to decide things through force are, in fact, in the way of democracy, development and dignity.

They have no tolerance for a different point of view and believe that a principle can only be defended by the language of violence and by condemning those who do not accept it. For both of them there is no shade, there is only black and white.

The basic thing, I believe, is that wrong means will not lead to right results. This is no longer merely an ethical doctrine, but a practical proposition. Mahatma Gandhi was right when he said that if methods were vitiated the ends were bound to be vitiated. His assessment and what August 9 represents are more relevant today than the Ganapati festival.

The MPs who have reduced the duration of parliament session are not seeing beyond the electoral politics.