Our Tryst with History

We buy three newspapers on weekends- the Times of India, the Hindu and the Indian Express. Browsing through newspapers is the best and the most satisfying way to spend the two days before a fresh but pedestrian week of routine begins, the commonplaceness of which is capsuled in Samuel Beckett’s unique statement: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new.”  The expectation is that there will always be at least one thought provoking article in one of them. But today on the 69^th Independence Day, I had the bonus of three separate articles, one in each of the newspapers to give me enough mental drill to keep my grey cells well exercised through the next seven days.

The first was by Kanti Bajpai in the Times Of India about India as a theatre state, the second by Professor Pratap Bhanu Mehta in the Indian Express on Independence Ennui and the third by Ziya Us Salam in the Hindu on History as a continuum of conflict, cooperation and conciliation. The first two present a realistic , albeit pessimistic state of Indian parliamentary democracy as it is now while the third, anchored on the idea of History offers a possible solution to our current state of darkness at noon that is so sharply drawn by Kanti Bajpai and Prof. Mehta.  

The recently concluded monsoon session of Parliament has raised questions about our proud claims of being a robust democracy, claims that rest purely on the successful conduct of elections every five years. But our elected representatives do not have a clue to parliamentary etiquette which calls for reasoned debate and civilized behaviour.  What had happened in the washed-out session that concluded a couple of days back was a re-run of the drama of 2013, enacted many times during the UPA rule from 2004-2014 ,except for the change of the dramatis personnae. Kanti Bajpai is quite charitable to call India a ‘theatre state’ where theatrical performances are enacted on the Parliament stage by our hon’ble  elected members. Theatre is not an odious term  as it refers to the arena where the activity  of communicating and the activity of conveying  message through performances  take place to provide the audience both entertainment and instruction. But there is always a good theatre and a bad theatre where the quality differs due to poor script and poorer acting ability of the players onstage. Whether it is comedy or tragedy, vaudeville or slapstick, the language of the script and acting it out make all the difference.  Every play consists of a beginning,  a conflict , reaching a  climax and at the end the denouement. In our Parliamentary theatre, there is no beginning as the play straightaway plunges into conflict and action, the climax is quickly reached with the members trooping into the well and the denouement is in their walking out with the session adjourned for the day. This drama has been played out ad nauseam during many sessions in the past and to that extent the washout of the present monsoon session is not a new phenomenon. In our Parliament, the script is ready made with the opposition in direct conflict with the ruling party on every trivial as well as serious issue. The speeches and action are left to the spontaneity of the players who act out on the spur of the moment, by rendering the script in high decibels and following it with rushing to the well of the House shouting hoarse. There are no rules of dramaturgy to be followed as the actors on a cue from their leaders have only to ensure that there is no reasoned debate, no comprehension of their script, and no discussion except to re- create a modern Tower of Babel. A large majority of our elected representatives have never been schooled in theatrics and so their acting is impromptu where their swift movement towards the well is paralleled by their use of lung power. The climax is reached when everyone speaks and no one is heard( a la some of the TV debates on our news channels). The opposition         troops out talking in different voices, bringing the curtains down for the day.  What we witness is a mockery of Parliamentary procedures. Our representatives lack education in cultured behaviour and cultured use of language. They have never been initiated into debates where the first principle is the art of listening. This is followed by the art of understanding, analyzing and logically discussing all important social and political issues using cultured language and measured tone. When there is no listening and only simultaneous speaking by all members, the tower of Babel rises up to its architectural glory. Kanti Bajpai is more than charitable in defining India as a theatre state. It will be truer to call India as a ‘pseudo theatre state’ as the theatricality on display is not even comparable to a slapstick comedy or buffoonery.

Prof Mehta is more caustic in his comments as he accuses our elected representatives for causing political ennui through their mindless play acting. Though he reserves his diatribe more for the Congress charging it with mediocre leadership, pettiness, destruction and inability to come to terms with losing its place in the Treasury benches, he assails the ruling BJP, the present occupants of those coveted Treasury benches  for its hubris, arrogance and visceral hatred of the Gandhis(the mother-son duo). The Theatre of Conflict that our parliament has turned into, no longer witnesses a clash  of the Titans as in the past but a worthless clash between Lilliputians whose knowledge of theatricality stops with the shrill exercise of lung power.

Both Kanti Bajpai and Prof Mehta do see a glimmer of hope in the midst of this chaos. For Bajpai, hope lies in a future date when our society will change from its medieval rural mindset to become modern and urban. But such optimism is more of a hope than a potential actuality as the present members of our Parliament (that includes both the opposition and the ruling parties) who indulge in unseemly slugfest have an educated, urban and modern background. For Prof.Mehta hope lies in the resilience of the people of India who have the rare ability to chug along with stoic accommodation of the mindless players, taking our genetic violent pathology in its stride.

Amidst all these doomsday prophecies, Ziya Us Salam’s article on the Hindu offers  possible hope by understanding history as a cyclical continuum that begins with conflict, moves through cooperation and ends with reconciliation. He recalls his history teacher who had compared history to an unreserved railway compartment where at every station new passengers rush in to get a seat while those already in the compartment try to defend that territory. As the train begins to move the jostling for occupation gives way to some slight accommodation –almost at the edge of the seat. Soon after, there is a gradual beginning of conversation and everyone joins in  and which is soon followed by everyone sharing one another’s tiffin.  By the time the train arrives at the next station, they would have exchanged their address and telephone numbers to continue the friendship forged during the journey. History is also a similar one of conflict starting with a fight to occupy another’s territory.  Once the fight ends and the territory is conceded, comes the mingling of two cultures and civilizations- both of the victor and the vanquished.. The initial period of hostility gradually gives way to a period of peace and progress. History moves through this cycle of conflict, cooperation and reconciliation and ensures that humanity survives.  Ziya Us Salam’s conclusion that history repeats itself and all conflicts –internal and external, all competition for possession of a coveted place or position finally resolves itself and a new civilization emerges as a result of the fusion of the culture of the conqueror and that of the conquered. Citing Bipin Chandra’s monumental work India Struggle for Independence, Ziya Us Salam points out how competitive communalism between Syed Ahmed Khan’s Muslim communal ideology and Punjab Hindu Sabha’s Hindu communal ideology got resolved with the National Congress movement uniting Indians into a single nation  that celebrated its tryst with destiny on August 15, 1947.  A similar drama is being played today with the substitution of names like Owaisi and Amit Shah and the like. While what is happening today is depressing and dismaying, hope lies in the conciliation that makes the last of the cycle that revolves round conflict, cooperation and conciliation.

It is time for our political leadership to see the conflict of interests through the prism of history. Congress has yielded the space to the BJP after a decade of rule. The BJP should see that the decade long Congress rule was a mix of good and bad governance. Instead of attacking and humiliating the Congress –as though its humiliation at the hustings was not emough, but has to be constantly rubbed in, it should be magnanimous to give Congress its due on GST Bill, Land Acquisition Bill etc while appropriating the same for boosting up the nation’s economy. The Congress, having yielded the treasury bench territory to the BJP should accommodate the ruling government’s new schemes that are modified and improved versions of the earlier ones. Cooperation and not conflict can bring them into reckoning in the future elections. History has shown that the spirit of give and take constitutes conciliation leading to a period of peace and progress. Can our leaders go back to history and look at it in a new way on the analogy of the railway compartment? If History has chronicled the  three ‘C’s  from ancient times to modern times and if India has survived invasions and conflicts and has emerged as one nation absorbing pluralistic cultures, civilizations, religions and languages, we can hope our present political leadership will engage itself to write a new history of a united, urbane, modern India combating conflicts through cooperation and conciliation.