‘Vedi Bana’ of India

by Nalin de Silva

(September 07, Colombo, Sri Lanka Guardian) India may be a single state nominally. It claims to have a pseudo federal constitution and has a Lok Sabaha in Delhi. However, are the citizens of India, Indians first and then Sikhs, Tamils, Bengalis etc., or is it the other way round? If not for cricket, of course introduced by the British Raj and Hindi films, is there an Indian identity as such? India which had never been a single polity until the English came to that part of the world, is ruled according to the structures introduced by the Englishmen, with the English speaking Viceroy replaced by a Hindi speaking Prime Minister. It is very unlikely that India will have a Muslim Prime Minister who cannot speak Hindi in the near future.

India is not a place where different communities have equal status. It is not multicultural except in a very narrow sense of the word. Most probably the young educated would have copied western ideals without realizing that in the west it is the Judaic Christian culture which is the dominant culture and certainly not the Muslim culture.

India has been demarcated into what are called states on linguistic lines, with each state having its own chief minister. There may be a few Tamils in Tamil Nadu such as Mr. Narayanaswamy, who could think of themselves as Indians first even when India is not at a game of cricket with other countries, and then as Tamils, but the overwhelming majority of Tamils in Tamil Nadu as well as in other places in India first think of themselves as Tamils and then as Indians.

The recent death sentence given to two Tamils presumably from Tamil Nadu and one Tamil from Sri Lanka for killing Mr. Rajiv Gandhi illustrates our point. For the Tamils from Sri Lanka who were LTTE cadres or supporters, Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of India and an order from Prabhakaran was enough for them to carry out the assassination. Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was from a different country, and in the eyes of the LTTE, had at that time become an obstacle to declaring an Eelam in the Northern and Eastern Provinces of Sri Lanka. However, for the Tamils from India Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was the Prime Minister of their country and there was no need for them to support the LTTE and Prabhakaran unless they considered themselves as Tamils first and then, if at all, as Indians. It is clear that as far as the Tamils from India too were concerned Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was from a "different country" and all that they wanted was an order from Prabhakaran. In Sri Lanka the LTTE terrorists killed the Sri Lankan President Mr. Premadasa, who for the LTTE was from a different country.

It may be asked why the LTTE killed Sri Lankan Tamils such as Messrs. Neelan Thiruchelvam, Lakshman Kadirgamar, A. Amirthalingam, and Alfred Duraiappa. They were killed for different reasons. They were all considered traitors though not for the same reason. According to the LTTE some collaborated with the enemy Sinhala government whereas some others were Hindu Vellalas who did not support the LTTE to the extent it wanted and were considered oppressors of the marginalised castes. It has to be emphasized that the LTTE fought against not only the "Sinhala government" and the Sinhala people but also the Hindu Vellala leadership. The Vellalas had wanted the LTTE to fight the latter’s "war", but the former have had different ideas since the inception as evident from the killing by Prabhakaran of Uma Maheswaran.

It has not been explained adequately why the death sentence given to the three assassins of Mr. Rajiv Gandhi was postponed by eight weeks. It gives ample time for people such as Vaiko to organise protests against the sentence, and if he were to be successful it would create problems for Delhi. Already some of the other states have come out against some of the Tamil Nadu leaders, and it is clear that India is a quasi-federal state only nominally and very superficially. The irony is that India wants to impose this unsuccessful model on us using its political muscle.

Conditions in India are so volatile that the Indians have failed in their attempt to establish even a stable quasi-federal state. Except for a small percentage of people educated in the English tradition and who have absorbed/imitated the English political systems into their culture, the vast majority of people consider themselves Indians only after calling themselves Sikhs, Tamils, Gujaratis, Bengalis etc.

The unfortunate Buddhists have no place in government except for an occasional diplomat and Mr. Ambedkar would be turning in his grave. I am not asking this question to show that the Buddhists have not been given their due place in professions and government in India but to show that the Buddhists in India are a very much marginalized poor and outcast community. If not for the steps taken by Sinhala Bhikkus in our country to protect Buddha Sasana to the dismay of the westerners and their henchmen and henchwomen in the Universities and in the NGOs Theravada Buddhism would have disappeared from the surface of the planet.

India is not a place where different communities have equal status. It is not multicultural except in a very narrow sense of the word. Most probably the young educated would have copied western ideals without realizing that in the west it is the Judaic Christian culture which is the dominant culture and certainly not the Muslim culture. The non Hindi speaking people could say that they were taken for a ride by the central government or the Indian Prime Ministers since independence. Hindu India has failed to imitate British India and without any alternative form of government India is only preaching "Vedi Bana" to Sri Lanka.