The deafening silence of a noisy nation

Looking at the state of the nation after 77 years of independence, I will start by conceding that, compared with their parents and grandparents, millions of Indians are much better off today. Many travel to far continents, build second or even third homes in India for themselves and their families, and do other things their forebears could not have imagined. 

That’s one part of the picture. Grimmer parts reveal galloping unemployment, young people committing suicide, a frantic search for jobs anywhere in the world, even in war zones, and other hurtful realities. Let me highlight two troubling features that get poor notice. 

The first is India’s silence. “What?” Surely India is lively, bustling, noisy! Of course it is, and much of the audible energy is heartening. Some silences are admirable, too. Through meditation and yoga, some Indians not only transcend unwelcome sounds, they find spiritual advance. Yet there is a disturbing silence. 

I speak of the silence from platforms of prestige when hatred and contempt towards particular groups of people is openly advocated, when the supremacy of the strong and the humiliation of the weak are brazenly demanded, and when even murder is explicitly asked for. 

I used to hear such poisonous calls a long time ago. That was in 1946 and 1947, when I was a boy of 11 or 12. Growing up in Delhi and going to school there, I breathed the fumes of fury and folly that accompanied the partition of what then was the huge undivided province of Punjab until its August 1947 split into India’s East Punjab and Pakistan’s West Punjab. (Later, East Punjab would split into Punjab, Haryana and Himachal.) 

In relative terms, Bengal, the only other province that was cut into two halves, saw fewer killings in 1947, though Bangladesh’s liberation struggle of 1971 would exact a great carnage. 

To return to my boyhood in 1946-47, I also heard those calls of venom being immediately and fearlessly denounced, above all by Mahatma Gandhi, but also by other remarkable leaders like Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Maulana Azad, Rajaji, Rajendra Prasad, Sarojini Naidu, Jayaprakash Narayan and Amrit Kaur.

In October 1946, when Noakhali, now part of Bangladesh, erupted with Hindus as victims, Gandhi went there to stand, walk and live with the Hindus. To Noakhali’s Muslims he spoke the blunt truth. From Noakhali, he went to Bihar, where Muslims were the victims. Gandhi walked, stood and stayed with Bihar’s Muslims, and spoke bluntly to Bihar’s Hindus. 

In September 1947, when Delhi saw violence, Nehru once stormed out of his government vehicle on a road close to where I was growing up. He ran into the rioters and told them: “Hit me first before you hit a helpless Muslim.” 

Not seeing or hearing anything even remotely like that in the last 10 years from leaders of the government in New Delhi, I have felt hugely let down and also profoundly sad. Moreover, the leaders’ extraordinary silence in face of threatening speech and oppressive conduct has been matched by a similar silence, or even open approval, on the part of others, including among those who control TV channels and newspapers. The men of prestige who occupy Hinduism’s religious platforms have also stayed mum. 

My second disturbing reality is the popularity of the ‘curse thy neighbour’ doctrine. This doctrine is fervently preached within India for relationships between states, between regions within a state, and between adjacent caste or linguistic groups. It is not easy to think of two governments of neighbouring states in India that enjoy a high degree of mutual trust and respect. 

This doctrine of limiting any warmth for the neighbour is also often kept in mind, though seldom openly spelt out, when it comes to India’s relations with adjacent countries. 

Isn’t it astonishing that our ancient land, so rich in wisdom, and blessed with suitable quotations from centuries past for any modern crisis on our globe, has so completely forgotten the simplest, shortest and wisest advice that human beings ever received, which was to love your neighbour as yourself? 

When, very recently, the people of Bangladesh rose against a long spell of autocratic rule and compelled the resignation of a lady who once was a brave young hero but had sadly transformed herself into the head of a harsh and insensitive regime, what was the first reaction of our government? 

Addressing the Rajya Sabha on August 5, the Union Minister for External Affairs, S Jaishankar, said that the government was “monitoring the situation with regard to the status of minorities” in the neighbouring country. Jaishankar was making a perfectly legitimate point. Bangladesh’s minority Hindus have reasons for anxiety, for the forces that were demanding Sheikh Hasina’s ouster included groups espousing an ideology that frightened Hindus. 

But what about Bangladesh’s majority Muslims? Are these close neighbours of no concern to us? Does their escape from autocracy give us no gladness? When most Bangladeshis (including, we can be sure, many Hindus) opposed the Hasina government’s extraordinary policy of reserving a truly hefty percentage of government jobs for the children and grandchildren of the country’s freedom fighters of 1971, was the people’s opposition not natural? Was it not essential? 

Hindus living in Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Myanmar, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan do not exhaust our neighbourhood. South Asia also contains Muslims, Buddhists, Christians and Sikhs, and people of other faiths, or of no faith. 

In 2020, dislike of the Muslim neighbour went far enough for the government of Haryana to even change the name of Faridabad’s Abdul Ghaffar Khan Hospital. Who was Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan? A dauntless foe of imperialism and of partition, imprisoned by British and Pakistani rulers for a total of about 30 years, he was a founding father of free India and also of free Pakistan. 

Can only they be neighbours who speak the language I speak, or belong to the caste or religion to which I belong? Dear Pungundranar of the Tamil country, you who taught us centuries ago that “every human is my kin and every town my home”, if you can’t be reborn today, please at least invade the minds of girls and boys in every corner of India.