Requiem for a Marathi manoos

Big issue

Ambadas Haribhau Dharkar is a small footnote in history. A Marathi manoos with a good job in HAL and a nice house.

He had a family, wife and two daughters. He was in no way taking any jobs away from any client of the Maharashtra Navanirman Sena. For all we know he may have even voted for them.

Yet he deserves a larger presence in our memories  than he will get. Maybe those who care about the freedom of all Indians to live their life as they like in any part of India should celebrate his sacrifice.

We need Dharkar Societies, Dharkar Clubs, Dharkar Samaj where  peaceloving Indians can meet and celebrate their identity as Indians . Let they be constant reminders to all what the price of Raj Thackeray’s ambition is.

It is not just the Thackeray parivar who want apartheid to be imposed on Indians. They have already excluded South Indians, Muslims and North Indians from their own Mumbai.

Soon they will cast out Gujaratis, Parsis, Christians and then perhaps  Marathi speaking non-Marathas such as Chitpavan Brahmins . The Assamese kill Bihari workers at road-building sites.

In Orissa, Sangh parivar people attack Christians while the BJP chief minister looks on benignly. Vilasrao Deshmukh loves to laugh at Vidarbha farmers who commit suicide, but is too fussy to move quickly against Raj Thackeray. Karnataka and Tamil Nadu fight over the waters of the Kaveri.

Narendra Modi wants to protect the Gujaratis of Kenya indeed Gujaratis round the world but not his own Muslims. They are not Gujarati enough for him. Karunanidhi wants to be the spokesperson of all Tamil speaking people, be they in Sri Lanka or Malayasia.

After all what does it matter if they killed a prime minister of India? The Sikhs agree. They have made Bhindranwale an honoured presence in their pantheon. He is Sikh first and an Indian perhaps last.

Sir John Strachey said a century and longer ago that there was no such thing as India. It was just a ragbag of different languages and religions and tribes. How right he was. The idea that there was an India was the product of the febrile imagination of the western-educated native babus.

We tried for a while to deny this. No, no! we said, we are a nation. Of course we are. We had an Indian National Congress to prove it. It met all over India and passed resolutions.

When Bengal was partitioned by Curzon, the Hindu bhadralok of Bengal took to boycotts and  riots. Yet this glorious chapter of the Independence struggle was a battle by Hindu zamindars to deny power to their East Bengal Muslim peasants. Within 40 years, Bengal was partitioned.

Gandhi’s ecumenical strategy succeeded in binding the wounds for a while. But  the India of his dreams got partitioned and he was assassinated because he was not a good enough Hindu for the ultra Hindus.

Nehru tried a better story which relied not on religion but on secular nationhood. India gave itself a Constitution, a revolutionary document. It defines India in terms of its citizens regardless of caste, language, religion, gender, literacy requirements.

The Nehru story is now in tatters though through no fault of his. Indira and Rajiv Gandhi redefined secular as pandering equally to Hindu and Muslim vote banks. So Ram Lalla was admitted to the Babri Masjid and Shah Bano was sacrificed to the Mullahs.

The penny dropped and people realised that instead of claiming to be Indians and waiting for the Government to do something for you, why not jump the queue and redefine your identity narrowly — Hindu, OBC, Dalit.

So now we have 200 plus parties, none asserting that all Indians are equally Indian citizens. Two weeks after Raj Thackeray’s outburst, neither Manmohan Singh nor Sonia Gandhi has told it straight that all Indians are the citizens of all India.

LK Advani did say it but here is doubt whether his party really believes in the identity of all Indians regardless of religion. He did not denounce the Orissa attacks.

So it is Shah Rukh Khan and Shyam Benegal who have to do it while politicians are calculating how their vote banks will be affected if they say that all Indians are equally Indians.

The significance of Ambadas’s death is that he was travelling with fellow workers who had got their jobs for the skill with which they work and not because they were Marathi, Hindu or OBCs.

Ambadas Haribhau Dharkar’s name should be emblazoned across Maharashtra, indeed across all of India. Ironically a Marathi manoos, he was killed to satisfy the ambition of the dividers. But it is he and people like him who go about their daily jobs who are creating a single India despite the efforts of politicians of all parties to divide and kill. It is in IT, cricket and Bollywood that we will create a single India.

The day of his political murder should be made an annual All Indians Day where we can reaffirm that whatever the politicians do for their sordid purposes, as citizens and human beings we are one and we intend to remain one. We can no longer rely on our leaders but must in our daily routine at work and play, in offices and streets and restaurants we will not practice apartheid based on language or religion.

The writer is an economist.