Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Gandhi as Narrated by Mishal Husain

"Gandhi:Life and Legacy" is a 2009 BBC production. I have, however, seen it only this month. It is a three-part three-hour full biography of Mahatma Gandhi, very impressive, informative, and thought-provoking.
The lady presenter Mishal Husain's Pakistan background makes it all the more interesting. She says at the outset, 'They(her grandfather and others in the family, or more broadly the Muslims in India generally) didn't feel that he(Gandhi) was a leader for them or understood the fears they had about an independent India dominated by the Hindus'. So the family fled to the newly-born Pakistan at the time of the Partition of India into India and Pakistan in 1947. So did many other Muslims, millions of them. Likewise innumerable Hindus and Sikhs fled Pakistan to India. Mishal is checking this evaluation of India by her own family throughout her presentation.
It was mostly the deteriorating communal, and predominantly the Hindu-Muslim, relations that worried her family at that time. These relations worsened by the stiff attitude of Gandhi, the presentation says, at the time of the Second Round Table Conference convened by the British Government to discuss the constitutional future of India at London in 1931. The presentation goes further and says that it was Gandhi who wrecked the RTC by his refusal to agree to the demands for separate, as against joint, electorates by others, and made it impossible for it to arrive at a new constitution of India.
Without trying to defend Gandhi in particular, let me raise some reservations on these points.
First, the Hindus and Muslims, the two major communities of India, had already agreed on the separate electorates back in 1916. It is another question whether the system is conducive to a better relations between the two, as it was a system which makes a political dialogue across the communities impossible and unnecessary.
The nature of the system being as above, there had been several attempts to reach an inter-communal agreement to do away with the system, but unfortunately they failed. The most prominent of them was the Nehru(Motilal) Report of 1928 and some amendments put forward by Muslim politicians. Gandhi was out of the picture then.
Third, Mishal, while researching on the RTC, was told that it was Gandhi who brought the Conference to a failure. But was it not a fact that, while the other delegates were all nominees of the British and therefore not likely to say anything embarrassing to them, Gandhi was the only one appointed by a political party(Indian National Congress)?
That was the unique value of Gandhi at the RTC. It was said in the narration that he was unprepared. It seems he was always unprepared for a meeting in the form of papers, and spoke on the spur of the moment. But he had made it clear before leaving India that his only point was to demand India's independence. The others did not do so.
Therefore to pass such a judgment on Gandhi would be rather out of date now. True, Gandhi went home empty-handed, but he was prepared to concede the separate electorate and a more decentralized government, once the Muslims agreed to support the Congress demand for independence, and to ascertain if the separate electorate was supported by the Muslim masses. They were not interested.
The 'untouchables' occupied a large segment in the story. It was very critical of Gandhi. True, many of them look at Ambedkar and not Gandhi as their 'liberator'. Gandhi tried to cope with their problem in his own peculiar way, as with almost every other problem. Still the question remains if they would have been better today if they got separate electorate of their own? They have got something like that since Gandhi's 'fast unto death' in 1932, and also in the new constitution of independent India drafted by Ambedkar. Their problem now is that of poverty which is a part of the problem of overall poverty in India. Gandhi at least showed the way of khadi(hand-spinning and weaving) and other village industries, prohibition, prevention of diseases and so on as the solution. But the ex-untouchables today are divided on the issue.
The British tried to make use of the Muslims and the 'untouchables' to split the independence movement(see my discussions of B.R.Nanda's and T.R.Sareen's books in these blogs). The Indian Princes was the third such element, the most persistent legacy of which is the Indo-Pakistani conflict over Kashmir.
Given the conditions at the time of the Partition, Mishal's forefathers would be justified in their fear of the Hindu dominance. But she was doing more justice to Gandhi when she said at the end that she was 'ambivalent and skeptical' toward Gandhi in the beginning, but that has changed and she now thinks he was 'genuine' in his intentions.

Sunday, March 11, 2012

One Year On, But...

It is 11 March 2012 today, one year from the triple tragedy of the earthquake, tsunami, and the nuclear disaster which together devastated large tracts of the Northeastern part of Japan. About 16,000 persons died, and 3,000 are still missing. Ninety per cent of the deaths were caused by drowning, that is, by the tsunami, which pounded about 530 km of the coast by waves of more than 10 metres high.
Japan is a land of earthquakes, and we know that many of them are accompanied by tsunami. In the old school textbook we read the story of a village headman who saw the sea receding after an earthquake from his house on a hill, and called the villagers to his place by setting fire to the harvested rice of his own. This was based upon what really took place in Wakayama Prefecture in 1855. But we must admit that the possibility of a coming tsunami, and that on such a scale, had slipped out of our mind at the time. Everybody was talking of the fierceness of the earthquake, and fixing their houses or offices badly hit by it.
They were therefore caught almost off-guard by the tsunami, which struck in a matter of half an hour or so, to wash away the towns along the beautiful ria coast in the area together with thousands of their inhabitants, their houses, their all-important fishing ports, making wide areas almost empty.
In addition, there are 344,000 displaced persons still unable to go back to their original houses. Most of them are tsunami regugees, who are prevented from going home as their places of work, schools, or nursing homes for the aged have been lost.
But the most dreadful part of it is that a substantial number of them, and I regret I am not able to give a more accurate figure here, are those who have fled the radioactivity from the Fukushima First Nuclear Power Plant. In their case it is not possible to know how long they have to wait before going home, or if they can go home at all.
At the moment only a few out of the 54 nuclear reactors in the country are operating(six of them are in the Fukushima First), as many of them are undergoing periodical inspection. The Fukushima disaster was caused because all the supplies of electricity to the reactors were cut off by the quake and the tsunami, with no provision whatsoever for such an emergency. Public opinions are divided on the future of the nuclear power generation. But the majority seems to be in favour of closing down all the reactors as there is no guarantee that the like of the Fukushima disaster can be prevented.
True, we have a high demand for electricity in summer and winter seasons. The level of utilization of renewable energy is still low. We may have to depend more on the fossil energy with its high warming gas emission. But we have overcome the one year without depending so much on the nuclear energy. And the people, and even industries, have got used to a lower level of energy use, and by so doing have tried to find ways and means of curtailing warming gas emission. That is where our future, or at least one aspect of it, lies.
Therefore let us heartily join the voice which is coming up the world over.
Let Hiroshima and Nagasaki be the last use of the nuclear bombs. Let Fukushima be the last nuclear plant.

Friday, March 9, 2012

Iran an Active Volcano?

Once again the Prime Minister of Israel has rattled saber on Iran. In a speech in the US he seems to have urged the US to bomb Iran by saying that the US did not bomb Auschwitz during the Second World war.
It is an advice to come from a 'friend' with far-reaching disastrous consequences. It is against the international law either for Israel or the US to attack Iran while Iran is not attacking any country.
It is but natural that Mr.Obama has placed emphasis on the importance of a peaceful mode of solving the Iranian question, if only for the reason that she is running out of her materials for fighting another war after a full decade of fighting.
We should keep in mind that this decade-long fighting has been fought on both sides of Iran, Afghanistan and Iraq, and as such it has been nothing less than sabre-rattling by the US against Iran.
It is not only these ten years. The US, or the Anglo-American, intervention in Iran started in the CIA-backed toppling of the legitimate and popular Prime Minister of Iran, Mr.Musaddiq, in August 1953. It continued in supporting the oppressive monarchy of the Shah's regime. After the fall of the hated monarchy, they took the side of Iraq when Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in 1980 to 88, supposedly to contain a storm which started blowing over the Middle East. Very soon the Gulf War followed. And the 9/11.
I am not in support of the deterrent theory, as I have often written in these columns. But if there is one country in the Middle East which would like to take the help of this theory, is it not Iran, under the constant US surveillance, with her carrier fleet or two just in her front, with Israel in the striking distance, with Russia in the north again believing in the might(in the months preceding the anti-Musaddiq coup the Soviet Union stopped buying oil from Iran, thus weakening the position of the government)?
So this is far from a simple 'Iranian question'. But what about her nuclear threat? What about her oppressive regime, which succeeded in silencing the most developed civil society in the region in 2009?
Yes, these questions do exist. But the military is not the solution. The US with its nuclear arms and with her past record with Iran has no right to say anything on Iran's nuclear policy. Both Iran and Israel should support the idea of the nuclear-free Middle East. It would change the entire atmosphere. Iran should withdraw from assisting Syria's Asad, whose hands are stained with his people's blood beyond repair.
Anything possible between the US and Iran? I would sincerely propose an exchange of soccer teams between the two, as quickly as possible. The hospitable Iranians will immediately respond. This is what Mr.Obama must have got in mind when he said 'There is still a window of opportunity'. Or, would it turn the Jewish votes against the Democrats in the coming November?