The year that was

Was also a year that is best forgotten…

This column will appear on the last Sunday of 2014. And as I sit down to write it, I can’t help but think back on the year gone by. But hard as I try to look for something positive, all the images that flash before my eyes are of violence and grief; sadness and despair.

I guess that is only to be expected. The aftershocks of the ghastly Taliban attack on a Peshawar school still have me shaking with sadness, anger, and the realization of our impotence in the face of crazed madmen who subscribe to a murderous ideology. Those gory pictures of bullet-ridden children and a blood-soaked school auditorium will live with me forever, no matter how much I try and erase them from my memory. And maybe that’s how it should be. None of us should ever forget the evil that monsters inflict upon us – and more tragically, on our children.

But even when I look beyond the horror of Peshawar, the theme of violence and grief refuses to recede. The riot victims of Muzaffarnagar continue to live in makeshift homes a year later, looking for justice that seems forever out of reach. Communal riots in the Trilokpuri area of Delhi have revived the traumatic memories of the 1984 pogrom against the Sikhs. And in Uttar Pradesh, communal clashes have become so common that they barely merit mention in the national papers. And yet, every such incident leaves indelible scars in its wake.

More significantly, what every such clash represents is an attack on the idea of India itself. That idea – of a secular, inclusive, tolerant India that treats every citizen equally, no matter what his or her religion – has increasingly come under attack as the lunatics scramble to take over the asylum. The first weapon deployed in that fight was the idea of ‘love jihad’: a ‘jihad’ in which Muslim men were apparently targeting Hindu girls and marrying them after converting them to Islam. Thankfully that campaign was junked after it didn’t get much traction in the UP polls.

Ever since then, though, we have had a long line of loonies jostling one another in the competition to be most outrageous. First off the mark was Sadhvi Niranjan Jyoti, a BJP minister, who announced that the people of Delhi needed to decide if they wanted to be ruled by ‘Ramzadas’ (children of Ram) or ‘H****zadas’ (bastards). Next up was BJP MP Sakshi Maharaj, who claimed that Nathuram Godse was as much a ‘deshbhakt’ (patriot) as Mahatma Gandhi. Both of them retracted these statements after a public outcry (and presumably, a private bollocking from saner elements in the government).

But despite their climbdown, Godse, the killer of Gandhiji, continues to be the flavor of the season with various offshoots of the Sangh Parivar. Some fringe outfits in Mumbai celebrated November 15, the day when Godse was hanged in 1949, as Shourya Divas. The Akhil Bhartiya Hindu Mahasabha asked the government to install busts of Godse in public places across the country. And the same outfit is now threatening to release a film, Desh Bhakht Nathuram Godse, on 30 January, the same day on which Godse gunned down the Mahatma in 1948.

Ironic, isn’t it, that an organization that styles itself as the ‘Hindu’ Mahasabha is attacking what is best about Hinduism – its values of tolerance, brotherhood, and universal peace – by glorifying an assassin who killed a man we venerate as a Mahatma? This really is violence of the worst kind; violence that tries to destroy the very values that make Hinduism the great religion that it is.

And that’s before we even start on the biggest controversy of our day: conversions. If there is any one thing that characterizes Hinduism it is its non-proselytising nature. You have to be born a Hindu; you cannot become one by conversion. That is one of the essential differences between Hinduism and both Islam and Christianity. Hindus don’t believe in converting others to their faith. And you can’t really be a Hindu if you do that.

Ah, but the right-wing crazies have a way out of that. They are not converting anyone, they say, they are just welcoming them back into the Hindu fold. It is not ‘conversion’ when Indian Muslims and Christians become Hindus, they explain, it is merely a ‘gharwapasi’ (homecoming). Never mind that the ‘home-comers’ are complaining on national television that they were misled/bribed/terrorized into giving up their faith.

All this banging on about religion; glorifying murderers and assassins: where have we seen all this before? Ah yes, in Pakistan, where that same sorry journey to religious extremism and militancy led to the massacre of 132 innocent children in Peshawar this month. There, but for the grace of Indian secularism, go we…

It is for all these reasons that I, for one, will not be at all sad to see 2014 go. Maybe we’ll have a better time of it in 2015. With that wish – and a prayer – I wish all of you a very Happy New Year.

Sorry seems to be the hardest word...

If David Cameron finds the Jallianwala Bagh massacre ‘deeply shameful’, why stop short of a full apology?

There are many ways in which we use the words, ‘I am sorry’ in our everyday lives. We say ‘I am sorry’ when we hear that a friend has lost a parent, a rather inadequate way to express our sympathy but most commonly used nonetheless. ‘I am sorry’ trips off our tongues when we can’t make it to a cousin’s birthday party, and indicates that we would have loved to come if it had been at all possible. ‘I am sorry’ is the standard response when we break the neighbour’s flower vase or window pane, to express contrition for something that is fairly and squarely our fault, and to indicate that we are ready to make reparation for the loss.

And yet, as the words of the song go, sorry ‘seems to be the hardest word’ when an apology is called for the most. It is when we have hurt someone very deeply that we find it most difficult to summon up words of remorse. It is when our actions have caused irreparable damage that contrition is often the hardest to express. It is when the sin is unforgiveable that forgiveness is so hard to ask for. (Just ask Narendra Modi.)

Over the last week or so, the media have been full of reports of David Cameron and the apology that never was. Should the British Prime Minister have apologised for the British imperial government’s decision to open fire on peaceful protestors at Jallianwala Bagh, which resulted in the death of 379 people while more than a thousand were injured? Yes, the incident occurred in 1919, decades before Cameron took office, but as a representative of Britain did it behove him to say sorry for what had been done in the name of the British people?

As it turned out, Cameron steered clear of the ‘s’ word. Instead he wrote in the visitor’s book, “This was a deeply shameful event in British history – one that Winston Churchill rightly described at the the time as ‘monstrous’. We must never forget what happened here. And in remembering we must ensure that the United Kingdom stands up for the right of peaceful protest around the world.”

Even if you gloss over the fact that it is hardly politic to invoke Winston Churchill – who was adamantly opposed to granting India independence and who famously referred to Mahatma Gandhi as a ‘half-naked fakir’ – at the site of one of the greatest atrocities perpetrated by colonial Britain, Cameron’s comment falls well short of a full-throated expression of regret. But the Prime Minister remains convinced that this was the right thing to do.

“In my view,” he said, “we are dealing with something that happened a good 40 years before I was born...So, I don’t think the right thing is to reach back into history and to seek out things that you can apologise for. I think the right thing is to acknowledge what happened, to learn from the bad and to cherish the good.”

So, is it really necessary, or even helpful, to reach back into history and apologise for wrongs that happened a century or more ago. Well, the Americans, great proponents of what they term ‘closure’, certainly think so. Which is why in 2009, the US Senate passed a resolution apologising for slavery. So, if US representatives can apologise for the collective guilt that all White Americans bear for the enslavement of the Blacks, then why can’t the British government, in the person of the British Prime Minister, apologise for the crimes of colonialism? Even the former German Chancellor, Willy Brandt, went on his knees at a Warsaw memorial to the victims of the Holocaust to express contrition 40 years after the event.

So, even if Cameron could not say ‘I am sorry’ in the sense of ‘I have broken your vase and it is entirely my fault’ why not just say ‘I am sorry’ in the sense of ‘I am sad to hear of the tragic passing of your father and I feel for your loss’? But for some reason, the British Prime Minister, who has apologised for everything from the Hillsborough disaster which left 96 people dead 23 years ago to the killing of a Belfast lawyer, Pat Finucane in 1989, thought that apologising for the deaths of hundreds of innocents at Jallianwala Bagh was a step too far.

As someone who says ‘sorry’ almost reflexively – even when it is patently the other person’s fault – I find that a bit hard to comprehend. After all, nobody asked David Cameron to travel to Amritsar, visit the memorial to the victims, lay a wreath, and write a comment in the visitors book. It was his decision to visit Jallianwala Bagh, to reach into the past and examine wounds that had lain long buried. And when you have gone that far, why stop short of an apology which may actually help heal some of these wounds? When you use words like ‘deeply shameful’, regret is implicit in them. So, why shy away from voicing it?

There is nothing quite as disarming as a heartfelt apology. When someone says ‘I am sorry’ with patent sincerity, it is hard not to forgive, whether it is a spouse, a parent, a child or a nation that is expressing regret. But sadly, Cameron failed to do that. I can only hope he’s sorry now.

Feet of Clay

Why do we expect our heroes to be epitomes of all-round perfection?

Doing my usual trawl of news sites recently, I came upon an interview with Nelson Mandela’s eldest daughter, Dr Makaziwe, popularly known as Maki, the child of his first marriage to Evelyn Mase (whom he left for Winnie Mandela).

A child when her father was sent to prison, she was grown up with kids of her own by the time he was released. But all her hopes of establishing a close father-daughter relationship with him were soon belied. She says now that while Mandela may be a warm, extroverted presence for the entire world, with his own family he seems incapable of expressing his love, always remaining a distant, emotionally unavailable figure.

As I read through the long interview – in which Maki is at pains to point out that she no longer holds his emotional coldness against her father; that’s just the way he is and she has made her peace with it – I couldn’t help but be reminded of all the other larger-than-life political figures who seemed to have failed those closest to them.

The most famous example of this phenomenon – in which an iconic leader wins over the world but fails to gain the affection of his own immediate family – is, of course, Mahatma Gandhi. Those of you who remember the controversy over the film, Gandhi, My Father, will recall the salient facts. The Mahatma had a strained relationship with his first-born, Harilal Gandhi, who became a drunk, converted to Islam in an apparent attempt to provoke his father, then reconverted to Hinduism before dying a penniless alcoholic.

He said famously of the man who was referred to as the Father of the Nation: “He is the greatest father you have…but he is the one father I wish I did not have.”

Ironic, isn’t it? That Gandhiji, the man who was affectionately called Bapu by the entire country, failed his own son so spectacularly? That Mandela, the man who is held up as a symbol of hope and reconciliation in the entire world, couldn’t emotionally connect with his own daughter?

But while it may be jarring to discover that our idols have feet of clay, perhaps we really shouldn’t be that surprised. So, our heroes also have dysfunctional families just like the rest of us. Of course, they do. We may have built them up as larger-than-life mythological figures on our imagination. But at the end of the day, they are only human, made of the same flesh and blood as you and me. Just as we struggle with the various facets of our personality, so do they. And yes, just like us, sometimes they fail at one thing or the other.

Some of them may turn out to be spectacular failures as fathers. Others may be revealed as terrible sons. Some may fail at being faithful husbands. Others may fall well short of our modern standards of political correctness.

But for all their faults, there is still something about them that marks them out as leaders of men. They may be bad at the small stuff, but by God, they know how to deal with the big picture.

Take Winston Churchill, for example. If he were alive and in British politics today, he would be exposed for the racist bigot that he was. His view on Indians – whom he derided as “breeding like rabbits” – was that they were a “beastly people with a beastly religion”. He damned Hindus as a foul race “protected by their mere pullulation from the doom that is their due”. He hoped for “bitter and bloody communal violence” in India so that the Raj could last longer. And yet, despite these racist views that were expressed all too often privately, who can deny that Churchill’s leadership was pivotal in defeating Hitler in World War II?

If the media had been as intrusive at the time that John F. Kennedy was President of the United States, Camelot would not be the one thing that JKF is famous for today. Instead, he would have been seen a Clinton-esque figure best-known for his serial adultery and the fact that he had sex in the White House pool with a succession of women. Several years later, Bill Clinton went one further by having sex in the Oval Office itself. But unlike Clinton – whose entire Presidency became a late-night show gag after the Monica Lewinsky episode – JFK got away with it, until more recent biographies unearthed all the dirt about what would today be termed his ‘sex addiction’.

And more’s the pity, if you ask me. Think about it. Do we really need this kind of intensely personal, sometimes distressingly private information about our leaders? Do we really need to know if they are cheating on their wives? Or that their sons and daughters are disappointed in them? Quite honestly, what purpose does this serve?

At the end of the day, we have to judge our public figures by their public lives and their achievements in this arena. And if we want to do that, then their private lives should remain just that: private.