The emasculating effect of ahimsa! (Part 1)

"Banyaon ka mulk hai. Woh log hamara kya ukhad lenge?" This is how people in the upper echelons of power in Pakistan speak about India, according to Brajesh Mishra, the former National Security Advisor. He stated this without so much as batting an eyelid on a popular TV show. Lest you wonder why our not-so-friendly neighbours from the north-west have referred to us as 'baniyas', well, the thinly veiled reference, obviously, is to the caste of the father of our nation. 

Bapu has been accorded demi-god status in our country and a pre-eminent position in the pantheon of Indian leaders. So, the automatic implication and extension of this nationalistic metaphor is that all Indians are Bapu's children. Hence, we are all Baniyas. No, this is no laughing matter. You would miss the point completely if you think the Pakistanis were scoffing at Bapu's caste and grafting it on to the rest of the Indian populace, Manu and his social stratification notwithstanding. If that had really been the case, we could comfortably have dismissed it as a rank bad joke of an inebriated mind somewhere in the secretive cocktail circuit of Pakistan.

The implications, sadly, of this comment are deeper and far more telling. They reflect a Pakistani conviction based on dealing with the Indian state ever since independence, not to speak of the baggage of partition they continue to carry. In fact, it goes way back. It goes all the way back to Bapu himself. Gandhi made a creed out of ahimsa, around which he wove his entire political philosophy. Indian historians sympathetic to the Indian National Congress, and its leadership and politics, have harped on the non-violent nature of our national movement. They display selective amnesia, though, when they underplay the communal carnage that engulfed the subcontinent, triggering a mass exodus of populations, which was unparalled in human history.    

Gandhi's ahimsa seemed to have failed. His sermonising seemed to have fallen on deaf ears of blood-thirsty rioters on a rampage of rape and pillage. Thousands of innocent men, women and children—Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs—lost their lives or livelihood, uprooted as they were from their soil, alienated from their home. When Jinnah threatened civil war if India was not partitioned, Bapu developed cold feet. His ahimsa prevented him from accepting Jinnah's open challenge to wage war. In the end, what went on for days and weeks was nothing short of civil war, any way. What is worse, we had already paid the price of partition.

*** to be continued