Humble in Victory

LITERATURE MUST BE getting a little tired of history. Our propensity to drop ‘historic’ into every second sentence of prose or conversation has made a powerful word fragile. For ancient Greeks, Clio, daughter of Zeus and Mnemosyne (or memory) was the muse of history, but her patronage extended only to famous or celebrated individuals. A better metaphor is Janus, the Roman deity astride the gates of both Europe and Asia. Geography however limits the allegorical interpretations of Janus: his two faces look at both the end and the beginning, the past and the future. A historic event is not significant because of sensation, but because it signals both closure and continuity.

It is in this sense that the prana pratishtha of the temple to Lord Ram at Ayodhya on January 22 is historic. After many lifetimes of conflict, numerous decades of fractious dispute and interminable court battles through the difficult demands of process, there is reason to believe that a wounded psyche has been healed, and hope that the two new places of worship will evolve into symbols of reconciliation. It will take time, but not as much as pessimists think. This is the bend in the river of time which will ease the floods of passion that have caused so much destruction. For me, the high point of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s oratory on January 22 was his message that this was a moment of not only vijay but also vinay. Humility saves victory from becoming oppressive. Monarchs, diseased by mankind’s genetic weakness, never understand this; for them, victory is synonymous with pride. The Ayodhya temple honours divinity; its consequences must reflect sacred virtues, the highest being peace among men in the world created by God. (I use men specifically, not as a generic substitute for the human race; history is also witness to the fact that women rarely, if ever, start wars.)

Mahatma Gandhi, the greatest Ram bhakt of modern India, was a votary of Ram Rajya as the ideal rule for a rejuvenated and independent India. For him Ram Rajya was the liberation of the deprived from poverty, of the oppressed from harsh gender and caste injustice, and of the nation from the merciless inequity of foreign rule. Gandhi, more familiar as Bapu to his beloved people, hated the very thought of religious conversion, for he accepted the discursive dimensions of faith as practised in a multi-religious world. He called himself a “Hindu of Hindus”, a devotee of Sanatan Hinduism to the core of his being. In 1931 Gandhi laid down the principles for a Constitution of independent India at the Karachi session of Congress, with Sardar Patel as president. Chief among them was freedom for every faith. Bapu’s daily prayer meetings echoed with a fervent adoration defined in simple lines: Ishwar Allah tero naam, Sab ko sanmati de Bhagwan. There cannot be a more important prayer for contentious times; may the Lord give us all better understanding.

THERE WILL BE surprise in many quarters at this verse from the much-lauded Urdu poet and philosopher Sir Muhammad Iqbal, who died in April 1938 but has been adopted as poet laureate for opaque reasons by Pakistan, proclaimed in March 1940 and born, with the British as midwife, in August 1947: Hai Ram ke wajood pey Hindostan ko naaz, Ahle nazar samajhtey hain isko imam-e-Hind. Hindustan is proud of the existence of Ram; Those with understanding consider him a religious icon of Hind.

A PASSING THOUGHT, given the visible fervour sweeping through the people with the consecration of the Ayodhya temple: Will Ramnavami, which celebrates the birth of the seventh avatar of Vishnu on the ninth day of the bright half of the lunar cycle of Chaitra, now be complemented by Ramjanami on January 22?

A FRIEND FROM RUSSIA told me this folktale from his land. A cart got stuck in the river. Three animals were harnessed to the vehicle to pull it out: a pike, a crayfish, and a swan. The pike, following its instincts, pushed forward. The crayfish, which swims backward, went in the opposite direction. The swan could only dream of flying with the cart into the sky. The cart never moved.

Does this remind you of anything? Perhaps of the I.N.D.I.A. Alliance, still huffing and puffing to sort out contenders and candidates when the scream of the starting whistle is already resounding in the political atmosphere. We could start a little quiz: Who are the pikes, the crayfish and the swans? The swans, of varying colours, are most evident, all dreaming of soaring towards the prime minister’s seat in Delhi. Congress has announced its candidate for prime minister, Mallikarjun Kharge, with immediate repercussions. Nitish Kumar has responded with the game of silence, letting rumours speak louder than facts as he strikes a distance from alleged allies on minor or major issues. The retired, and perhaps tired, swan Sharad Pawar has floated into parallel waters, beguiled into political miscalculation by parental love. DMK is the crayfish of the south, retreat the best means of return to its comfort zone. The Communist Party of Kerala (Marxist) is the second crayfish, wisely concentrating its energies on the backward flip. The pike of 2023, Mamata Banerjee, has been equally judicious, deciding that 2024 is not the year for any forward movement. Better to save the harvest in your backyard. Akhilesh Yadav might be in danger of being neither fish nor fowl. Arvind Kejriwal, leader of AAP, is still trying to become a pike but remains seriously underweight. As for Congress leaders, all of them are anxiously looking for that elusive prize of Indian democracy, the safe seat.

A proverb attributed to the great ancient Greek dramatist Euripides might prove to be a useful reminder for the I.N.D.I.A. allies: One loyal friend is worth ten thousand relatives. One feels compelled to add that Euripides was famous for writing tragedies.

A master of comedy can get it equally right. Oscar Wilde, so cleverly wrong about so much, was immaculately right when he pointed out that true friends stab you from the front. As a definition of opposition politics in India, it works.

As for ruling parties in our country, the syndrome shifts in a neat semi-circle. Once again, we must learn from a great poet. As William Butler Yeats is believed to have said: There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met. Yeats was talking about Ireland, not Bihar. The Bihar amendment is: There are no strangers here, only friends whom left you before.

A GREAT MYSTERY OF media is summed up by the question: Why do stories disappear when the humongous problems they expose still persevere? Here is a case in point.

One of the signature projects in Britain is the High Speed 2 railway line, first proposed in 2009, started in 2012, and to be completed heaven knows when. It covers only 230km of track, with 54 state-of-the-art trains, but then Britain is a small country albeit with a big bureaucracy. Sometime late last year, or after more than a decade of work, someone discovered that there were not enough doors for the carriages. More specifically, only one door had been ordered instead of the regulation two. If this was corruption, it might have been understandable if not forgivable. Venality comes in many ways, some creative enough to win awards. But this was a case of stupidity. Why is such stupidity not a criminal offence? Because the story disappears before it imposes accountability.

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