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by Kuldip Nayar
(May 02, New Delhi, Sri Lanka Guardian) The escalating violence in the country is frightening. Still more frightening is the shape it is taking. Somewhere it has turned communal, somewhere regional and somewhere ideological.
Whatever the direction, it indicates a trend where the rule of law is lessening and where the use of force is gaining legitimacy.
So wide is the compass of violence that the tainted security forces cannot provide an answer. In fact, a thana is no more a police station. It represents a centre of excesses. Can an ordinary person go there and expect fair treatment, much less a fair trial? Still, Home Minister Shivraj Patil announced the raising of more battalions — as if force can solve all problems.
It is obvious that certain issues have been awaiting serious tackling for a long time. Letting them fester is not going to help. The nation has been witness to this for years. Some basic decisions have to be taken to sort them out. This is not peculiar to India. The entire region suffers from this malady. Problems are allowed to pile up. Then comes a time when governments and people begin to live with them because touching the status quo is considered as stirring up a hornet’s nest.
India has a National Integration Council that draws its members from political parties, including the regional ones, the chief ministers and some intellectuals. Jawaharlal Nehru created it. I imagined Prime Minister Manmohan Singh would have convened its meeting, particularly when it has not met for years. It could have discussed eruptions or mini-mutinies going on here and there, with a view to adopting some ground rules in the spirit of consensus.
At least, the parties should not stoke the fires if they cannot douse them. Instead, I find some parties arming their cadre for jumping into the fray to make space for themselves. The Naxalites, however misdirected, are at least candid and say that they do not believe in the ballot box. Their trail is marked by blood and it is visible.
But what is disconcerting is that others who vow faith in the parliamentary system are equally violent when it comes to their own interest. They may well sing the song of democracy, but they are behind none in resorting to the worst type of methods to achieve their ends. Had they been carrying out their exercise in some hideouts, they would not have harmed society.
Their doings are having an ominous fallout. The public is beginning to equate violence with the democratic system. Confidence is turning into cynicism. Indeed, the machinery to enforce the law has become an instrument of tyranny in the hands of the rulers. Opponents know it to their cost. The worse is that the security forces stage false encounters to eliminate opponents and trump up cases to justify the killings.
The most contaminated lot is that of the civil servants. The Economist, an influential weekly from London, recently ran a cover story to point out that the 100 million-strong force of civil servants in India is the biggest barrier in the way of faster growth and equitable distribution. Ethical considerations which once guided public servants have been generally dim and in many cases beyond their mental grasp. The desire for self-preservation has become the sole motivation for their actions and behaviour.
Manmohan Singh’s pep talks to them to work hard and honestly are of no avail. They have lost the awareness of what is right and do not realise what is wrong. On the other hand, people are finding the dividing line between right and wrong, the moral and immoral, to be sinking in the sands of opportunism and oppression. They are confused. No wonder, they are taken in by promises of a demagogue, or the gun shown by a so-called deliverer.
Political parties still do not realise that an appeal to violence is dangerous because of its inherently disruptive character. We have too many fissiparous tendencies to risk the use of force. Violence, even otherwise, produces an atmosphere of conflict and disruption. It is absurd to imagine that out of the conflict, socially progressive forces will emerge, as the Left in India tends to believe.
There is inherent unity which foreigners, even Indians, marvel at. I recall that when I was India’s high commissioner in London, the Soviet Union was tottering. Margaret Thatcher, then British prime minister, told me about the advice she had tendered to Moscow: learn from the example of India which had stayed together for hundreds of years despite people professing different religions, following different castes and speaking different languages. She asked me what I attributed this to. It took me some time to explain to her that we in India did not divide things into black and white. We believed that there was a grey area which we have been expanding for decades. That represented India’s pluralism.
Seventeen years later, I feel that what I told Mrs Thatcher is changing perceptibly. The spirit of tolerance or the sense of accommodation providing glue to our integration is drying up. Such parties which are trying to deny or defeat the ethos of secularism are harming the country’s unity and catholicity. They have their own agenda and want to pursue it even at the expense of the nation’s togetherness. India can disintegrate like the Soviet Union if the nation does not awaken to the dangers of conflict and clash. Political parties should not only eschew violence but also the language of violence which instils division and hatred. The situation is too disconcerting to be left alone.
Take Gujarat. There is still no repentance in the state. The Madhya Pradesh government takes back cases of violence against the RSS men. However, respect for the supreme court of India goes up when it sets up a committee headed by retired, respected police officials to look into the cases in Gujarat where there was no adequate probe to identify the guilty. I wish that political parties like the BJP would appreciate India’s ethos of pluralism because the courts of law cannot go beyond a point.
(The writer is a leading journalist based in Delhi.)
- Sri Lanka Guardian
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