The nature of India

A protest rally in Srinagar on August 22.-NISSAR AHMAD

It is urgently necessary for all Indians to stand back and consider the country in all its complexity and to absorb that complexity in what they do.

WE live in a dangerous age, wrote Jawaharlal Nehru in 1953, where only the strong and the united can retain their freedom (quoted in India After Independence by Bipan Chandra, Mridula Mukherjee and Aditya Mukherjee, page 175). Fifty-five years later, the perspicacity of what he said is even more apparent, and frightening.

This is not merely in the very narrow context of the present situation in Jammu and Kashmir but in the broader context over time in what has happened and is happening in the northeastern States, in what is happening in Orissa, Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand, where the Maoists actually rule the region and the writ of the government does not run. It is in the context of the call for Bodoland, for Gorkhaland, for a separate State of Telangana, for a separate State of Vidarbha, and for the many other such demands that will without a doubt come up in the future.

We talk of the plurality of India. But what is India, actually? This is not a question that needs to be answered by scholars who produce learned theses on the identity of the country but by people in the streets and villages of India. It also needs to be answered by those who are charged with the administration of this country, not only at the top, though it must be certainly answered by policymakers first, but by the armies of officials in different government agencies and offices.

It is most commendable that the Prime Minister has formulated a Look East policy and also set up a Ministry of Northeastern Affairs. That is the northeastern region, then, taken care of. But has it been, and can we the citizens of the country afford to put it away in the refrigerator of our consciousness? That Ministry will be only as effective as all the other Ministries let it; if the Ministry of Shipping, Road Transport and Highways were to go ahead with its own plan for the region, assuming it has one, the Ministry of Northeastern Affairs will be a mere spectator.

To be truly a central coordinating agency for the massive effort to develop the region, the Ministry of Northeastern Affairs must have complete control over all that is being done by all Ministries and agencies, including the security organisations, in the region. One does not know what the situation is on the ground and if that is indeed the role that the Ministry of Northeastern Affairs plays.

There are other areas where the nature of India is being questioned. It is being questioned by Maoists over a large region in what is virtually the heartland of the country. What is being done to resolve the questions this poses to the integrity of the nation? Will there be another Ministry for the Maoist-run areas of the country? And another for the other demands for autonomy and for separate States?

The key lies not in treating the symptoms in all these places but in going to the cause, the actual disease. Is it surprising that it is now being asked by many just what the governments of the State and the country were doing all these years to resolve the perceived resentments in Jammu and in Kashmir and in all the other regions where there is a demand for a separate identity?

In Kashmir the demand, on the face of it, is for azadi, which can mean different things from autonomy to complete freedom. This demand was made in the 1990s and since then there have been a number of self-congratulatory comments from the Central government that all is now well in that State. But is it, really? The recent agitations and the resurfacing of the demand are a clear indication that it is not.

The violence in Jammu, again, is not simply about land for the Shri Amarnathji Shrine Board. It may appear to be that, and the sangharsh samiti may have withdrawn its agitation once the agreement on the use of the land at Baltal was signed. But much else surfaced during the 40-day agitation: many perceived resentments, many instances of local problems being ignored as the State and Central governments strove to pacify the valley. Thousands of crores of rupees will be spent, it is said, on the rail link between the valley and the rest of India; how much has been spent on laying roads to link the remote regions of Jammu with towns that provide basic facilities?

We have to come back, again, to what the nature of India is, to policymakers, to officials who translate policy into executive action, to political parties, and to people on the street. A Railway Minister may win votes in his constituency by providing that area with a number of trains and elaborately refurbished stations. What about the rest of India?

A Minister for Road Transport may, again, win much adulation from his supporters by redoing and widening roads and highways in his State. What about the rest of India? Apart from the Prime Minister, and one or two other Ministers, one is very doubtful about the concept of India that the other Ministers have. This is compounded by the fact that the Ministries of the Government of India and their innumerable offices and agencies in New Delhi are staffed overwhelmingly by men and women from the adjoining States Uttar Pradesh and Haryana. There are some employees from the southern and eastern States, but they are a small percentage of the total workforce in the Ministries. These are the people who, from the bottom up, shape the nature of the action that the government finally takes.

The result is a preponderance of people who define, even if unconsciously, India as an area consisting vaguely of Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan and perhaps Punjab. They are aware of some other areas but these are notional, nothing to which they relate in any way. There is, to put it baldly, no concept of the nature of India when they work, whatever they may say when questioned in an examination (for which they learn the answers by rote anyway).

Centuries ago, Adi Sankara walked the length and breadth of a region that was not called India, nor was it one country; but he clearly perceived it as one entity, from Manipur in the east to Kashmir in the north, and from Gujarat in the west to what we now call Tamil Nadu and Kerala in the south. The British brought all of that together as one country; perhaps from a distance, to a foreigner, the outlines of such a country were clearer.

Now we have it, or at least a great part of what they left, as one country to ourselves but are too concerned with our immediate surroundings to consider its existence as it is its vastness and, above all, its infinitely different regions, each with its own problems that demand urgent and equal attention.

It is urgently necessary for all policymakers, administrators, scholars and people in general to stand back and consider the country in all its complexity and to absorb that complexity in what they do. The problem of Kashmir is not confined to that part of the country any more than the problem of Nagaland is confined to the northeastern region. It concerns all of India, not because it is politically one but because it is one in diverse ways.

A problem in one part of the country is of concern to the whole, just as an infection in one part of the body has an inevitable effect on the rest of it. The sooner we realise this, the closer we will come to discovering the manner in which our problems can be resolved.