Column

At some point, sooner rather than later, India has to decide whether it is a sovereign democratic republic or just a loose and weak confederation of warring tribes, where people are delineated, segregated, discriminated against and identified primarily by gender, caste, religion and now, increasingly, by region.

The problems of gender, caste and religion meanwhile remain with us as we grapple with this other form of division — damning by region.

On the face of it, politicians look like the most likely candidates for blame. And blame they deserve, from Raj Thackeray to Lalu Prasad Yadav, Amar Singh and Abu Asim Azmi.

There is a danger in allowing our politicians to run away with this subject — make no mistake, they are self-serving enough to look for the short-term gains from division rather than be bothered about long-term damage. We already know that. To allow them full rein could well be disastrous. Maturity is largely missing from our
political arena; let us not abandon it in all other aspects of our lives.

That Mumbai’s housing societies discriminate on the basis of religion and eating habits is not new. And ever since the riots that followed the demolition of the Babri Masjid, this ghettoisation is now so common as to have become acceptable. Of course, it ought not to be.

We need to be breaking down barriers, no matter how painful, not building upon old ones. Long ago, we used to be subjected to some truly sanctimonious and clichéd documentaries about ‘unity and diversity’. Yet, no matter how silly they sounded, the message was vital. Strangely — though perhaps there is no connection — just as the documentaries stopped, our various prejudices against each other got stronger.

The problem of housing societies and their quirks points to the pettiest aspects of the human condition — that people tend to club together to feel comfortable. Shared dietary habits and language give us a communal familiarity from which it is hard to escape. We give these comfort zones the patina of tradition, religion and that all-encompassing non-contestable word, ‘culture’, so that our defences are ready when questioned.

Sadly, change comes faster than we realise — the same Mumbai which during the post-Babri Masjid riots had Hindus trying to ensure that their Muslim neighbours were safe from the mobs, now has Hindus keeping Muslims out of their ‘safe strongholds’. Yes, there are particular types of Muslims who fear Hindus and there are particular types of Hindus who feel an unhealthy disdain for and fear of Muslims.

Yet, both have more in common with each other than either will care to admit — they are in fact the same in their bigotry and to reason with both is almost a lost cause. Perhaps they should be forced to live together and save the rest from their infectious prejudices?

Yet, this is not a state of mind that will serve us well in the world and the time we live in. The global village is another one of those annoying truisms, but it is upon us. It is anachronistic for people from any one region of India to refuse to have truck with people from another - whether Hindi-speaking, Punjabi, Haryanvi, Sindhi, Pahadi, Rajasthani, Gujarati, Bihari, Marathi, Tamil… is it necessary to even go on?

We are almost at that stage where nationhood itself will be an outdated concept. Europe is trying it out, having practically invented nationalism. The internet is already making geographical boundaries meaningless and social networking has regrouped people into interest-based categories — people affected by the enormous Harry Potter phenomenon or people who track the latest technological advancements in cell phones.

It’s important to understand what Eric Schmidt of Google means when he says, “The internet is… the largest experiment in anarchy we’ve ever had.” The chips are down. Which century are we stuck in?

Email: b_ranjona@dnaindia.net