Main kahan hoon?

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A good way to deal with the problems of Indian governance is to develop short-term memory loss. If we can forget what was touted as poisonous for us just a few years earlier, we can swallow it as panacea today. I often feel that the Indian janata is like that poor heroine in a demented Bollywood film who wakes up after an accident and, batting her false eyelashes, plaintively asks the two eternal questions: “Main kahan hoon? Aap kaun hain?” Don’t you wonder whether these are the same bunch of politicians we elected a year ago — or have some incompetent aliens taken over their bodies?
Every now and again we become victims of a carefully constructed car crash engineered by our ruling elite, develop amnesia and open our eyes in a whole new world. And sometimes new is not indicative of “nice”. And “new” is not modern or progressive either. In the past few months we have seen some of the most regressive measures being injected into our system. And all we can do is groan helplessly and mutter, “Main kahan hoon?” We really need not ask “Aap kaun hain?” because that smiling surgeon behind the surgical mask is the same friendly chap who sold us the car insurance policy.
For instance, one of the most frequently used phrases describing the wicked British Raj when we learnt history in school was about its policy to “divide and rule”. It was meant to indicate the worst kind of governance because it was responsible for our servility to the gora masters. We had capitulated and initially been overcome by them because they had this uncanny ability to spot a basic weakness in our social fabric: no two Indians ever need to be treated equally. It is always possible to divide us, if not according to class, then according to caste, religion or region. The short-term memory loss following Independence and the declaration of the Nehruvian caste-less society was a relief for many Indians, especially the middle class because we knew that once we forgot our caste we could become one happy homogenous indistinguishable group. Oh! The wonderful bonding that would follow! We would never again be exploited by our rulers or by each other. Centuries of treating lower castes as untouchables and other barbaric injustices would now be erased. If only.
For those who lived through the brief euphoria, it was a visionary exercise leading to very real social reform. Much much more revolutionary than any economic reform carried out post 1990. It was liberalisation from labels. Therefore, when the Census enumerators recently asked my parents about their caste — something they had abjured, treated as part of the freedom struggle, as a noxious reminder of a pre-Independence debilitating social disease — my mother quite correctly and proudly refused to divulge something her family had rejected as part of their loyalty to “new India”. She said her caste was “Indian”. Instead of falling into the trap of our new political masters who seem fairly keen to exploit any loophole to make us servile rent-seekers, there are still some patriotic Indians who remember the reasons why we were moving away from caste recognition.
But there is no lesson from history our present political masters are obviously prepared to imbibe. They would prefer to write their own version of history. Obviously, if our netas have votebanks which benefit from caste-based policies, then naturally we will be drawn towards needing a caste enumeration. Couldn’t they have found a different criteria? Of course they could. But then, they would not be able to “divide and rule”, would they?
And our own short-term memory loss has forced us to silently watch the explosion of caste politics onto the political stage, threatening to overwhelm us. If only we had leadership who (like my parents) would place the fact that we are Indians before greedily grabbing whatever our jaatwallahs can concoct for us! It would be so much more progressive to make policies for the economically-backward and focus on development issues which deal with the marginalised. It is also a far more secular way of doing things — as caste supposedly only exists in the Hindu society. The Mandalisation of Indian politics is as fundamentalist as the mandir debate — it’s a time bomb, created with the help of unprogressive politicians such as Lalu Prasad Yadav, who have made a career out of reaping the benefits of his caste.
This is one social experiment that we should have never embarked upon. When Rahul Gandhi talks about two Bharats, and dismisses “Modern Bharat”, he forgets the many positive features of the society his great grandfather had tried to engineer.
In many pockets of urban India, caste no longer determines job opportunities. Some time back, a young girl employed by us as a domestic worker to sweep and swab, said that her husband (a garbage collector) had now trained himself as a bar tender. He was available for large parties to mix cocktails at night, while continuing to collect garbage during the day. She asked me to spread the word around so he could find some gigs. His social mobility is possible only when we live in a caste-oblivious world.
But we are threatening to engulf the next generation in a caste war. No doubt, as things worsen socially (even as the Sensex soars), we will wake up a decade later in a further fragmented world, asking, “Main kahan hoon?” Modern India will be caste-driven and we will have gone back a hundred years. Don’t even bother to ask “Aap kaun hain?” Democracy has served India well. But our democratically-elected leadership has failed.

PS: Another buzz doing the rounds of Delhi is how a “positive” hype is now being created around the Commonwealth Games to deflect attention from allegations of corruption. Will our predilection for losing our memory frequently also come to rescue of Suresh Kalmadi and his cronies? Under the glamour and glitz of the Games will we forget the thousands of crores of rupees hoovered up and misutilised? Money that could have been spent on schools and hospitals. Or will we simply wake up, post-Games and exclaim groggily, as Mr Kalmadi and Sheila Dikshit are showered with praise: “Main kahan hoon? Aap kaun hain?”

The writer can be contacted at kishwardesai@yahoo.com [2]