View from the spider’s web
February 06, 2018
EVERYONE has the right to change their opinions and to
choose or dump their political beliefs or allegiances. At an
intellectual level, changing or discarding an opinion is considered a
sign of a healthy mind.
A cardinal rule in academia is
to keep questioning the axiom unrelentingly. Professor Sarvepalli
Gopal’s masterly lectures (in gentle Oxbridge) on the kisan movement in
Uttar Pradesh opened entire new perspectives for his history students.
However, when a student one day noted an anomaly in what he was saying
and what he had written in his book, the historian’s rejoinder contained
a world of wisdom: “Is there anything wrong in changing an opinion?”
Journalists
are a part of a society’s intellectual sinews. As with any other
profession, there are good journalists and bad journalists. Some
journalists, be it out of personal ambition or missionary zeal, cross
over into the political arena.
Well-regarded journalists
in India have gone to the Congress, others have gone to the BJP. A few
have become active members of the Aam Aadmi Party and so forth. Some
journalists end up becoming public relations officers for business
houses they otherwise served less honestly as handout hacks. There was a
time when a fairly large number of journalists actively belonged to the
left, some of them card-carrying members of this or that communist
party.
Well-regarded journalists in India have gone to the Congress, others have gone to the BJP.
After the recent bout of communal violence in Kasganj in
Uttar Pradesh a few of my colleagues rushed to the spot to investigate
the story. I picked up Riot After Riot, an insightful book by a
journalist-turned-politician about religious violence and other forms of
conflicts dogging India. M.J. Akbar’s book carries a word of praise
from Khushwant Singh, another giant of a journalist.
The
Congress party inducted both as MPs; Singh went to Rajya Sabha under
Indira Gandhi and Akbar to the Lok Sabha to be part of Rajiv Gandhi’s
eventful tenure. Khushwant Singh supported Mrs Gandhi’s emergency and
later sponsored the candidature of BJP leader Lal Kishan Advani to Lok
Sabha, a decision he later regretted. Akbar went over to the Rajya Sabha
as Prime Minister Modi’s handpicked man assigned to an important
cabinet post at the foreign ministry.
We don’t really
know what Akbar feels about the transition from this to that party. I am
not even aware if he has ever explained the reasons for the transition.
But let us see what he wrote earlier and whether his political move to
join the Bharatiya Janata Party, the political front of the Rashtriya
Swayamsewak Sangh he once criticised, came with a change of opinion
about his faith in India’s secular tryst.
“Law and order
have two enemies: the Full Truth and the Complete Lie. When people
realise the truth, they start revolutions. When they are fed lies they
begin meaningless riots.” I am quoting from Riot After Riot.
“Lies
are the staple of every communal disturbance. They are spread by people
who have a stake in this stupid violence, who have something to gain
out of impoverished Hindus and Muslims fighting each other. Businessmen,
traders, politicians, goondas, ‘leaders of cultural organisations’
(like the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh — RSS) feed the people with
lies, watch these lies become convictions in people’s hearts, watch the
passions build up, and then these leaders actually set up the events
which will provoke a conflagration. They simply stick a pin into the
nerves of people, and it is only a matter of time before the people
explode.
“Then, when the first round of violence is over,
when the initial steam has been let off, the lies keep on circulating.
The people must not realise that they have been fooled. Or they will
tear down their false heroes. There is fuel ready in the murky events
that make up communal violence, and upon this more lies are heaped and
spread.
“After all, if the Hindus and Muslims live in
peace, how will the RSS find another convert? How will the trader sell
arms? How will a shopkeeper have the pleasure seeing a rival’s shop burn
down? How will the goondas loot? How will the communalist kill fellow
human beings? Keep the life floating friends!”
In a
chapter titled ‘Split-level war in Jamshedpur’, Akbar blended some
serious spot reporting with useful insights into what can be discerned
as a pattern of communal violence generally, and in Jamshedpur
specifically.
“The steel city of Jamshedpur has
witnessed communal strife ever since the first steel mill was built. It
is now a nouveau riche city with different communities competing for as
much of trade and commerce as they can.
“Wealth breeds
crime as well as prosperity; the city has its share of the underworld.
Tension has many causes, many faces. Religious festivals and processions
lead to rioting which politicians are quick to exploit to their
advantage. Early, in April 1979, Bala Saheb Deoras, head of the
Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh, a Hindu fundamentalist organisation,
visited Jamshedpur and exhorted Hindus to assert their rights in a Hindu
country. Ten days later the city went up in flames, reducing entire
localities to ashes and leaving scores of innocent men, women and
children dead.”
Akbar’s journalistic exposés were celebrated as quiver to protect the poor and the abused from their exploiters.
Even
the Maoists had a soft corner for his work, as perhaps he had for them.
“The threads by which the tribal has been trapped has taken a long time
to weave. To create a good slave you must first kill his pride, his
self-respect, his notion of himself as an ordinary, equal human being.
The slave’s body is needed — the man’s for labour, the woman’s for
labour and abuse; but to control the body, the inner spark, which
ignites anger must be crushed. There are many weapons in the spider’s
arsenal, both psychological and physical, but the chief one is
dramatically simple: hunger.”
The writer is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.
Published in Dawn, February 6th, 2018
