Bapu's talismans do not work anymore

Ira Pande

The last few weeks have seen the most unusual weather the world over: cyclones in the Mississippi, snow funnels in Canada and North America, devastating storms in coastal Africa, in South America and even Central Asia. Here in India, we, too, have had our share of unseasonal rain and hailstorms. Someone sent me horrifying pictures taken in Fazilka after a recent hailstorm that was preceded by a tornado! Whoever heard of a twister in Punjab? They occur in the American Midwest, my faint memory of school-level geography told me. Yet here, someone had recorded Fazilka’s raging tornado-monster tossing trees as if they were mere matchsticks and running away with roofs, hurling sturdy iron gates spinning like killer frisbees across the mustard fields.

The same devastation has been reported from Madhya Pradesh, where farmers watched helplessly as their ripening fields of mustard, soya and wheat were flattened by rainstorms, followed by sharp hail that beat the crops down to lie dead in pools of water to rot. Earlier, there were sad tales of Maharashtra’s sugarcane and mango harvest being destroyed. Climate change is here, no doubt, but what is the insurance against agricultural loss? If this happens more and more often — as climate scientists predict — people might just sell off their farms and land and opt for a safer life in a city. And when such a migration from rural communities takes place, imagine the chaos that will result as they pour into cities and towns, ill-equipped to handle this surge.

Human migrations — which occur everywhere in the world as people flee hostile political systems, droughts, pandemics or wars (to name just a few triggers) — are now the subject of a very ugly debate as many countries are banning the entry of illegal immigrants from countries in the throes of political or economic stress. On the one hand are human rights activists who deplore the treatment meted out to minorities and people of a certain faith, while on the other is the right-wing lobby that feels threatened by wave upon wave of ‘foreign’ intruders. If allowed to come in as asylum seekers, they feel their own people will suffer as jobs will be taken away by ‘these people’, national identities will be erased and social upheavals will ensue. There is some merit in both arguments but — as is often the case — neither of them are entirely correct. In our own country, hostility against ‘outsiders’ came in the wake of the Bangladesh war when displaced families from East Pakistan fled with their meagre belongings to West Bengal and the Northeast. The political and social consequences of that are still shaking this region, almost 50 years down the line. In Maharashtra, the Shiv Sena thundered against the ‘Madrasis’ from Tamil Nadu and the ‘Bhaiyyas’ from UP and Bihar in order to keep the state ‘pure and safe for the Marathi manoos’. Delhi took a long time to accept the refugees from Pakistan, and many believe the vulgarisation of a genteel society came along with ‘those Punjabis’ from across the border.

Let’s face it, all of us carry myths about the ‘other’ in our heads. Some learn to remain civil and not air their prejudices openly, others do not. Then, as political parties discovered the vote banks they could carve out by appealing to the baser instincts of communities, things went rapidly south. Today, there is no party that can call itself tolerant and large-hearted. What is worse, they are losing their ability to listen to another point of view. With the rising tide of majoritarianism, I shudder to think of where this will lead future generations. We spout Gandhi-isms publicly but deep inside us are dark pockets of the most dreadful prejudice and suspicion about the other side. I need not spell out more clearly how peaceful, simple-minded folks are now weaponised warriors, created by fake news and WhatsApp groups, ready to kill and lynch anyone they perceive as a representative of another faith.

This is not what our land was known for: we lived with each other in harmony and accepted another way of life with a good-natured tolerance. Atal Bihari Vajpeyee, a man who we now remember with respect and affection, once said that people with small hearts (chhote dil wale) will never create large countries. How right he was! And how ironic that a man who was vilified in his lifetime as a right-winger is now remembered as the one whose heart was so large and accommodating that he even reached out to Pakistan and Kashmiri separatists in a memorable gesture of goodwill. For his inheritors to shrink this large-hearted legacy into small-minded bigotry is truly tragic. Not that the other parties are any better: those who championed social justice were the worst violators of that noble concept, those who had unsullied reputations of love and a genuine pride in an ‘Indian-ness’ are now ashamed to belong to a country that has given them so much love. The world is really headed into a spiral of destruction that will flatten all of us eventually.

I sometimes feel our generation saw the best and the worst. Our lives were a trailer of events that would alter the country we knew into a dystopia of hatred and violence. In the twilight of that generation’s life, perhaps it is time to say, ‘Ab tumhare hawale watan saathiyo.’ Bapu’s Satya and Ahimsa talismans work no more.