While many recent events bear out Samuel Johnson's famous pronouncement that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, the bigger question centres around the future climate of the country we live in. The formal political future is safe after a fashion. Governance might become ever more presidential, but the trappings of the parliamentary structure will survive. The social ambience is a different matter. Even self-professed independent TV anchors take their cue from the ruling party and jabber on about "anti-national" and "seditious" slogans when reporting protests against an official action like Mohammed Afzal Guru's hanging, forgetting that the country and the government of the day are two different entities.
Horizons are closing in to suppress the pluralism that India alone upholds among the five sovereign countries that comprised British India. Politicians rampage like goondas; lawyers are lawbreakers; policemen protect thugs. Temples are popping up on pavements and at street corners. The Ganga's virtues have become a matter of political and diplomatic boasting and exploitation. But hardly any new libraries are built. Those that survive from an era when our rulers did not need to display ostentatious piety and governments ruled through actions and not just slogans are mostly derelict. Instead of books, the emphasis is on a profusion of shopping malls. The explosion of restaurants, fashion shops, jewellery stores and health spas indicates a profligate consumerism that might, ironically, yet be the saving of an India that obscurantism threatens to engulf.
The ideal of a secular, socialist republic was probably never more than the dream of one man, who had imbibed his liberal democratic beliefs from the British and whose massive prestige enabled him to persuade an uncomprehending multitude to go through the motions of acceptance. Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi's Ramrajya was closer to grassroots thinking. People related more readily to someone they revered as the Mahatma than to a rationalist like Jawaharlal Nehru. Ramrajya resonates with the multitude although I suspect it means no more to the foot soldiers of Hindutva than a magnificent Ram temple at Ayodhya where the Babri Masjid once stood.
Nehru would have been shocked at today's posturing over beef. Although he was discreet about his own liking for filet mignon (as a CIA report confirms) because he recognised that most Hindus consider cows sacred and nothing was to be gained from trying to persuade them that Hinduism sanctions eating beef, he had no time for hypocrisy. To live and let live was the civilised code that underpinned Nehruvian India's unity in diversity.
Two recent developments concerning beef illustrate how that code is being eroded. One is Haryana's ban prescribing a 10-year jail sentence for cow slaughter. Given Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar's reported statement that Muslims would be "permitted" to stay in India if they stopped eating beef, many see the new law as an excuse to penalise the minority. The second is a report in The Telegraph newspaper that Delhi Police has informed the Union home ministry that not only do left-wing students at the Jawaharlal Nehru University worship "Mahishasura in place of Goddess Durga" but, horror of horrors, they even "asked for beef in (the) hostel mess".
This is not new. JNU radicals declared war on "food fascism" some years ago and heatedly debated the "Politics of Food Culture: The Holy Cow and Unholy Swine". It was old hat even then. When 19th century Young Bengal pioneers encountered "a snanshuddh Brahmin with the sacerdotal mark on his forehead, (they) danced round him, bawling in his ears, 'We eat beef. Listen, we eat beef'". Anything that is banned becomes a symbol of protest. That doesn't make the protesters anti-national, however much politicians vilify their non-conformism. It's worse when those who don't conform are butchered, as happens today.
None of this may be the government's handiwork. But the government sets the tone and its rumbustious followers (like the black-coated Patiala House toughs who may or not be licensed advocates) take up the cudgels that people in authority would rather not be seen wielding. A government's acts of omission are often more culpable than its acts of commission. Here, they are laying the foundations of a state steeped in village-level bigotry. There is hope, however, in the thought that the worldliness the new dispensation also encourages might temper its narrow sectarianism. Despite Indian ingenuity, imagination boggles at the notion of sanctimonious propagandists in designer apparel swilling alcohol, munching filet mignon and sending and receiving Valentine cards also preaching the virtues of the saffron state.
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