The policy of divide and misrule

We believe the imperialists followed the Divide and Rule policy. We told them we were a united people. They told us there was no such thing as India, a single nation. We told them they were wrong. Only the foreigners broke us up into religions and regions and factions. Before they arrived we were one.
 
That story we told the British was never quite true. First we broke into two: India and Pakistan. That we said just proved how divisive the imperialists were. Then Pakistan broke into Pakistan and Bangladesh. That we said to ourselves just proved how hollow Jinnah’s claim was that there were two nations in British India. But if there were not two nations then, were there three or how many more?

In the past fortnight, we’ve had the Gurjar rebellion. Many died and the problem is still not settled. Then in Silguri there are battles between Gurkhas and Bengalis. Raj Thackeray wants North Indians out of Mumbai as his uncle wanted South Indians out. Assamese kill Bihari road workers who work in Assam. Memories of Khalistan are being revived and the killers of Indira Gandhi are declared martyrs by gurudwaras in Amritsar. Now that election is in the air, the BJP is stirring up the Hindutva agenda, which is just shorthand for hating Muslims despite the few Muslims who are in the BJP.
 
Even as the division of India into castes and sub-castes continues, with political violence sanctioning such divisions, we also pretend that there are no inequalities among us or that there never were. So someone is objecting to a line in one of Premchand’s stories where he has a character who refers to kurmi-kahar as someone low down. Are we pretending that kurmis and kahars were never bywords for lower castes or that they still don’t suffer from deprivation even today?  In Aja Nachle, Madhuri Dixit sang a song which had a similar turn of phrase about chamars ,thinking they were sonis. It had to be removed. Yet if someone from the chamar caste did claim to be a soni, would he not face persecution in India today?

The reality is that we can divide ourselves into thousands of little cells and be proud of our individual cell. Indeed, the entire political system is built not around the idea of a single nation, but on divisions. The more particular your cell, the more vociferously you can demand that you be treated specially. The Gurjars are a case in point. They have been around for centuries as a community whose boundaries were always a bit fuzzy, as all such boundaries were. They are suddenly fighting to be labelled a tribe and want recognition as being lower than what people thought they were. To be labelled as backward, they are willing to die and inflict inconvenience and mayhem upon innocent bystanders.

The political system thrives on such mayhem even as it is paralysed by it. The breakdown of law and order and the discomfort to citizens do not move either the Centre or the State to assert the Rule of Law. Neither the prime minister, nor Sonia Gandhi, nor LK Advani can summon the courage to denounce the Gurjar demand as anti-national. No one is willing to say that if India is to survive as a single entity, such nonsense has to be outlawed. But none will say it because the logic of disruptive populism suits these political parties. If in power, they are all for unity. When in opposition they love to stir up division. The Gurjars get a wink and a nod from the Congress because the BJP is in power in Rajasthan. The UPA stands about wringing its hands in despair because it wishes to embarrass Vasundhara Raje. The BJP will do the same to the Congress if they get a chance.

Indian politics is hollowed out of any principles or ideology. As parties get fragmented, they live in a jungle where they ally with each other one day and fight the next. The Congress is playing fast and loose with the NCP in Maharashtra because there are job anxieties as elections come near. But the Congress also knows it may need the Shiv Sena some day; so it will not seriously stop Raj or Uddhav Thackeray from bashing up North Indians or Muslims or anyone else.

These parties hope to come to power only by dividing India into thousands of vote banks. To guard your vote bank or to strengthen it, you let law and order break down. You let loose mayhem and murder, and cripple all administration. But you can’t afford to let any single group get too large. So if there is a vote bank with kurmis and kahars together, you get one or the other to start a separatist movement.

The only thing that prevents total breakdown is that none of these parties last in power for long and none commands an all-India respect any longer. This is why, as parties have fragmented more and more, they have become weaker. They can neither rule effectively when in office, nor disrupt things irretrievably when in the Opposition. So incumbents get thrown out and parties fragment. They can neither unify the country nor can they partition it.  It is risky option, but India stays united because although no political force wishes it to be so, none is powerful enough to break it up.
    
The writer is an economist and Labour Party peer.