Reimagining India and Partition through the prism of Brexit
The beautiful thing about Indian democracy is that it is reinvented every morning.
In chai-dhabas and in middle class houses, the newspaper is reborn and India becomes a Constituent Assembly to reinvent politics again. Every Indian becomes a CM or PM rethinking politics.
Years ago, the film artiste Orson Welles said, "Italy is a nation of brilliant actors and the worst one's are on stage."
India, similarly, is a nation of brilliant politicians and the worst ones seem to be in Parliament.
Notes
I was struck by this when I read the doomsday notes about Britain exiting from EU.
The doomsayers had a field day and some went to the extent of predicting that Scotland and Wales might think of exiting a provincial England.
While Europe discusses its favourite divorce, I was producing my own editorials.
For me, it is not the exit or entry that becomes important; it is the way we look at politics as a collection of closures or a vindication of possibilities.
People were worried about David Cameron resigning till one felt he is an easily missable man. Maybe a shock like this will make Britain rethink its politics.
This brings me to the idea of alternative politics, the idea of exploring alternative histories, playing around with alternative scenarios.
I was imagining a situation where England becomes a new federation of nations. Thinking of these scenarios, I was applying them to India to create fresh possibilities for our state nation.
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| Our worry about secession and sedition would diminish. |
Imagine an India where Partition did not occur. As a country we could be a different kind of unity where India would be the world's largest Islamic nation. India not religious creativity, with a revitalised Deoband setting out new possibilities of Islam.
The Sufi strand and the Bhakti strand would invent a spectrum of religious possibilities which would make secularism in its current form feel autistic. We would be more interestingly Bengali, more Muslim and diverse.
To my child's mind, India also would have a better cricket team with a Bangladeshi touch.
Maybe we would not be such a centralised nation and in fact be a greater democracy realising the looseness of the parts might contribute to a sense of a richer whole.
In fact, our worry about secession and sedition would diminish. I remember the late historian Dharampal digging up records to show that secession in India was the citizen's first right.
Villagers abandoned their villages if they felt the king was unfair and often the king had to run after them and apologise to bring them back. There is something endearing about such an act.
May be Europe should have worked harder to bring the English villagers back.
Possibilities
Let us push possibilities further.
Think of tribal India and the debates in the Constituent Assembly. Scholars were too preoccupied with the absent Muslim League or an Ambedkar while the Assembly was a circus of many dramas.
Tribal leader Jaipal Singh, a Cambridge Hockey blue told the Assembly that the Quit India movement was a process that had just begun.
He claimed he was waiting for other outsiders to leave so that tribals could return to their pristine democracy.
Imagine if Jaipal Singh was seceded or allowed to leave. Instead of a Sardar presiding over unification, imagine we had a leader with a different sense of unity and plurality.
Think of the tribal areas as a federation, a commons within India. The ecological idea of India would have been different.
Tribal languages would be alive and not subject to erasure. In thinking of alternatives histories, one is not only thinking of utopias and dystopias in terms of territory, or exits and entries into the union.
One is also thinking of alternative ideas of knowledge, development and culture. Imagine each school had kept a dialect and a craft alive as a skill, a competence.
Alternative histories and alternative imaginations would have shown that concepts like nation, science, technology, development and state are not frozen trajectories but a polysemy of possibilities, some still unthought.
One has to allow for what the American sociologist Robert Lynd called the outrageous hypothesis, where the impossible might emerge the next week.
Politics
Think of an England or France ruled by a majority of migrants or an India which has seceded from the intellectual property system, a nation which along with other BRICS countries has declared seeds, medicines as part of an international commons, a new UNESCO heritage which states origin and responsibility but denies patentability and property rights to any domain or artefact deemed as a universal heritage.
When we think of politics or events like Brexit, there is a sense of pathos of doom or hysteria of possibility, but no attempt to recover an imagination for politics.
One has to think of new ideas of Britain, an idea of India more open to South Asia and also new forms of interconnectedness beyond trade.
Imagine a new ethics of responsibility for the Himalayas. All this becomes possible when we loosen the imagination and geography on their own.
Brexit needs a spring cleaning of ideas.
India looking at Brexit, it has to go beyond trade, think of alternative histories and alternative futures, and create new possibilities.
The UN as it exists is a moribund, may be its time to exit and reinvent it or is that too seditious in this, so called age of security which creates not territory but huge enclosures of the mind.
(Courtesy of Mail Today.)