Ramlila swoop, the NAM curse, and India’s alternative future

By Rajeev Srinivasan The astonishing efficiency of the Ramlila Maidan marauders – especially in counterpoint to endemic incompetence in foreign affairs – brings into sharp relief the question of where India is going. Historical parallels with a Jallianwallah Bagh in India, a Tiananmen Square in China, and a Kristallnacht in Germany leave the casual observer bemused: how does this barbarity sync with rose-tinted, breathless stories such as the “World beats a path to Delhi” in the Financial Times just a few days ago. [caption id=“attachment_22594” align=“alignleft” width=“380” caption=“Sankaracarya Vasudavanand Sarsvati with yoga guru Baba Ramdev on the fifth day of his indefinite strike at Patanjali Yogpeeth in Haridwar on Wednesday. PTI “] [/caption] In fact, the casual observer need not worry about cognitive dissonance – he need look no further than the simple adage that “xyz is known by the company it keeps”. India, for unknown reasons, always chose to sup with a motley crew in the non-aligned movement (NAM). (China and Brazil never did so: they expected to be Great Powers one day; clearly India did not). And, therefore, the trajectory of NAM is as good an indication of India’s future as any. Few know that until recently –  even after he was toppled – the website of NAM named Hosni Mubarak as its leader. While Egypt’s um… revolution was unfolding, I checked out NAM’s website, and found that Egypt is the ‘president’ of NAM – and that NAM had been very quiet about the plight of the president of its president, so to speak. That is a good indication of NAM’s irrelevance. But I digress. I was actually looking at what had befallen NAM’s leading lights as a way of forecasting what could happen to India. The said leading lights were: Yugoslavia (Tito), Indonesia (Sukarno), Egypt (Nasser) and India (Nehru). NAM made them think they were important; it was a club for mostly marginal, mostly brown and black countries to rant against rich white countries. What is interesting, though, is what has happened to the NAM heavies above: Yugoslavia. Does not exist, has been dismembered due to religious violence between Christians and Muslims •Indonesia. Had a large part of its territory removed by force because of religious issues: Christians claimed discrimination in East Timor and separated • Egypt. Fed-up citizens deposed the kleptocrats • And India? In India, with Swami Ramdev’s movement, popular discontent over kleptocracy boiled over a la Egypt (of course before it was shut down by tear-gassing sleeping people, a la Bahrain). So India is following in the same general path as Egypt. But then it also has religious violence. One would imagine, therefore, by analogy with other NAM worthies, that either India will lose its territory or its kleptocrats, or perhaps both. Which last perhaps is not such a bad trade-off: “Here, take some land, but take our worst sinners as well.” Unfortunately, nothing so simple is good enough for India. Remember, India choose neither capitalism nor communism, but a Third Way™. Yes, Indian exceptionalism at work. The Third Way (aka ‘hybrid economy’) combines all the vices of both capitalism and communism, and none of the virtues of either. This was dreamt up by India’s clever economists, who thereby ensured that 200 million starving Indians in 1947 became 800 million undernourished Indians in 2011! Similarly, I fear that India’s equally wise social scientists have dreamt up a political alternative path for India: it will be dismembered, and it will get to keep the kleptocrats! Nothing but the worst of all possible worlds for India! The kleptocrats have convinced the urban idiottarati that even asking questions about loot is a crime. So they will stay. And so, who will do the dismembering? Why, the very same people who did it for the others! Nato did the honors to both Yugoslavia and Indonesia: they created a Muslim nation or two in the middle of the Christian Balkans, and a Christian nation in Muslim Indonesia. An excellent recipe for future peace and love, surely. So why not create a couple of Muslim and Christian nations in the middle of generally Hindu India? Already happened in 1947, did you say? Ah, but, there was no Christian nation – and now we have the perfect candidate, the Indian North-East. A century ago, it was, oh, around 100% Hindu, and now it is some 90% Christian, so naturally it deserves to be a Christian nation, or several nations, as the Nagas keep telling us. I noticed, in passing, that a piece by Paul Theroux dated 27 May (“The places in between”) speaks of Burma’s border with ‘Nagaland’ – not with India! It is a fact that many American maps ‘donate’ all of Kashmir to China and Pakistan, and they detach the North-East from India, while keeping mum about what that real estate is. India, they seem to feel, is a rough rhombus from Shimla to Darjeeling to Kanyakumari (the DMK may contest that) to Kutch (and the UPA may contest that). It is also a fact that India’s new northern neighbours (the ever-lebensraum-seeking Han Chinese), having swallowed up Tibet and built supply lines all the way to Sikkim, speak openly about linking up with the Bangladeshis in a surgical strike in the Chicken’s Neck area that would instantly make the above a fait accompli. Leaving the Hans aside (their global ambitions are clear enough), why would Nato want a friendly country (or at least a country that tries desperately to suck up to them) to balkanise? There are two reasons. First, Christianity has its back to the wall on home turf in Europe as Muslims are now 15%, and growing rapidly, in, say France. They have to find fresh converts elsewhere. Africa is a virtual dead heat. China – well, the Chinese Catholic church reports to the Chinese Communist Party, not the Vatican! So, of course, India is the obvious choice. Take the North-East, then pick off other parts one by one. Second, it is America’s nature. A correspondent, K, pointed out what SR Goel said about America in 1962: “… it [has] the record of a nation sick with an incurable malady – treachery and foul play towards her friends, and a fawning and cringing fondness for her foes.” Obama has demonstrated this in spades, the most recent being his speech to Israel. This could be said of India’s policy towards friends and foes too, but the Americans do a much more thorough job: just ask Noriega, or Saddam, former FoA, Friends of America. But I do not blame America, which is, after all, pursing its own interests. There is no way this could happen to India if there weren’t Indians willing to sell the country down the river. In the final analysis, that is what might make this alternative, apocalyptic vision the reality: the fact that there are many Indians who are simply Quislings. Rajeev Srinivasan is a management consultant.