The people’s piece

Let us look at ourselves in the mirror, with courage

SANKARSHAN THAKUR

Changing governments and leaders hasn’t worked too well for peace between India and Pakistan. How about changing the people? Imagine Atal Bihari Vajpayee and General Pervez Musharraf at Agra minus the baggage of their respective peoples. Imagine them talking without having to worry about what their people might say, what furies they might unleash if so much as a syllable is out of tune with the respective wills of their people? Imagine them discussing Kashmir without having to bother about allegations of a sellout. Imagine what a cakewalk that minefield would become if there weren’t the people to consider.

There is a grand rumour doing the rounds that the people of India and Pakistan are in the throes of peace. The pre-summit air is treacly thick with love and longing and the smell of piping jalebis that the people will put out on platters when the general comes home to the haveli of his childhood. The most charming abstractions have been set afloat, courtesy leadership seminars in five-star conference rooms and leading questions in television studios: Do you want peace? Do you believe in brotherhood? Aren’t mutual understanding and co-existence such lovely ideas? Well, aren’t they? And so what? Entente cordiale has always been a lovely, laudable idea. If the people of India and Pakistan have just discovered its prudence it is tragic. And if this is a reinvention of possessed wisdom, a rehashed clamour, it can only be that: a rehash that rings false. What makes it even more farcical is the cellophane of virtue that the plea for peace comes wrapped in — it is a call from The People whose sanctity, it appears, ranks next only to God’s.

What is this entity called The People? Which is the peace that they seek? Where are the holy wellsprings of this impetus for concord, that pious force struggling to break free of the cruel and uncaring clasp of the political establishments in New Delhi and Islamabad and unite the masses of India and Pakistan in pristine embrace? It is being made out as if the two people are all swarming about that evil fence we know in part as the International Boundary and in part as the Line of Control, their hearts aflutter like the wings of a million peace doves, their eyes shedding viscous tears of separation because Vajpayee and Musharraf will not let them meet. Beautiful people held apart by ugly politicians. What a rending tragedy.

But give the great abstraction called The People the slightest rub of the reality litmus and the piety around the myth begins to melt away in many contrary streams. The People are various and all cling to their own crooked pieces of the peace. To all of them peace is the shape of a map re-altered to their respective specifications. To most Pakistanis, the merger of the Kashmir Valley into their territory; to most Indians, the annulment of all Pakistani claims over Kashmir; to most Kashmiris, the birth of a new colour and new contours on the atlas. Whose peace are we talking about? Which People? Can Vajpayee sell the surrender of Kashmir to Indians? Can Musharraf go back to Islamabad having agreed to give up claims on Kashmir in the interests of peace? Will failure in Agra be the fault of Vajpayee or of Musharraf or will someone called The People stand up and take at least some of the blame?

Let us get real for once, let us look at ourselves in the mirror and have the courage to live with what we see. If we do not erase a few myths about ourselves, we will continue to blunder amidst lies. To begin with, there is no such thing as The People. It is a concept of convenience that interest groups invent and invoke from time to time to do their willing. More evil has been done in the name of God than good and the same is probably true of this thing called The People. God has a rampant record as unwitting licensee of bigotry and murder, so have The People. Vice committed in the name of God or of The People becomes virtue; it has a sanctimonious air about but that air stinks.

The other two myths we must confront are that we love Pakistan and we love peace. Sure, we love aspects of Pakistan but the same is not true of the idea of Pakistan; we love this Pakistani and that, a Faiz here a Nusrat there, but we don’t love Pakistanis. Before seeking peace with Pakistan, we must begin to accept Pakistan; chance would be a fine thing if we could be in love with them. But keep Pakistan aside for the moment, let us just look at ourselves and our love for peace. Follow the route of the pirouette of violence triggered by the release of Gadar; it ripped open, as very often in the past, the seams of our own internal Partitions. Read any version of events in Kashmir, Hindu, Muslim, patriotic, anti-national, and you will want to rethink the propriety of the peace-tag. Look at the splash of bloodied datelines in the newspapers. Travel to Manipur and Nagaland and witness how composite the face of The People is, witness their love for peace. There was violence against a ceasefire in Manipur; there will be violence against its termination in Nagaland. Go even further back, and at every corner, at every crossroads, you will find the powderflash of invented myths bursting in your face.

We love covering ourselves in candy-coated cliches that derive from Buddha all the way down to Gandhi. The truth is that we suffer the rashes of all manner of rabidity. We are, in various measures, communal (from the corpse-laden railway carriages that criss-crossed the frontier in 1947 to Ayodhya and its unfolding aftermath), racist (for details, read the matrimonials), casteist, sectarian, bigoted, tribal and, above all, violent. We put acid in the eyes of our undertrials and we butcher the mates of our children just because they make another sound when they say God. In relation to ourselves, we The People, are all of these and probably worse. In relation to our neighbourhood, we are quite what our neighbours see us as. Take a poll in the SAARC capitals and you would know.

It is easy, and convenient, to blame politicians for failures but who are they but mere extensions of The People? Politician-bashing is among the more harmless of our pastimes, and our politician is quite deserving of a lot of that treatment. But which forum erected in the name of The People has lived beyond the self-congratulatory cocktail launch? The politician at least stands in the ring and takes the brickbats, governments cannot run away from the dock. The People submit themselves to no such obligation. Theirs is just to demand and disparage, as will happen in turns before and after the summit. If Vajpayee and Musharraf have moved from Kargil to Agra it is not because of The People but despite them; it is not craving for each other that has driven them to the table, it is compulsion. If it is pangs they are suffering, they are more likely to be pangs of hunger than pangs of love. Lest we forget, The People need to eat too.