Maloo was shot doing two things he enjoyed immensely. Eating good food and
tossing new ideas. He was among the 13 diners at the Kandahar, Trident-Oberoi,
who were marched out onto the service staircase, ostensibly as hostages. But the
killers had nothing to bargain for. The answers to the big questions – Babri
Masjid, Gujarat, Muslim persecution – were beyond the power of anyone to deliver
neatly to the hotel lobby. The small ones – of money and materialism – their
crazed indoctrination had already taken them well beyond. With the final
banality of all fanaticism, flaunting the paradox of modern technology and
medieval fervour – AK-47 in one hand, mobile phone in the other – the killers
asked their minders, "Udan dein?" The minder, probably a maintainer of
cold statistics, said, "Uda do."
Rohinton caught seven bullets and by the time his body was
recovered it could only be identified by the ring on his finger. Rohinton was
just 48, with two teenage children and a hundred plans. A few of these had to do
with Tehelka where he was a strategic adviser for the last two years. As
Indians, we seldom have a good word to say about the living but in the dead we
discover virtues that strain the imagination. Perhaps it has to do with a
strange mix of driving envy and blinding piety. Let me just say Rohinton was
charismatic, ambitious and a man of his time and place. The time was always now
and in his outstanding career in media marketing he was ever at the cutting edge
of the new – in the creation of Star Networks and a score of ventures on the
Web. The place was always Mumbai, the city he grew up in and lived in, and he
exemplified its attitudes: the hedonism, the get-go, the easy pluralism.
For me there is a deep irony in his death. He was killed by what
he set very little store by. In his every meeting with us, he was bemused and
baffled by Tehelka’s obsessive engagement with politics. He was quite
sure no one of his class – our class – was interested in the subject. Politics
happened elsewhere, a regrettable business carried out by unsavoury characters.
Mostly, it had nothing to do with our lives. Eventually, sitting through our
political ranting, he came to grudgingly accept we may have some kind of a case.
But he remained unconvinced of its commercial viability. Our kind of readers
were interested in other things which were germane to their lives – food, films,
cricket, fashion, gizmos, television, health and the strategies of seduction.
Politics, at best, was something they endured.
In the end, politics killed Rohinton and a few hundred other
innocents. In the final count, politics, every single day, is killing,
impoverishing, starving, denigrating, millions of Indians all across the
country. If the backdrop were not so heartbreaking, the spectacle of the
nation’s elite – the keepers of most of our wealth and privilege – frothing on
television screens and screaming through mobile phones would be amusing. They
have been outraged because the enduring tragedy of India has suddenly arrived in
their marbled precincts. The Taj, the Oberoi. We dine here. We sleep here. Is
nothing sacrosanct in this country any more?
What the Indian elite is discovering today on the debris of
fancy eateries is an acidic truth large numbers of ordinary Indians are forced
to swallow every day. Children who die of malnutrition, farmers who commit
suicide, Dalits who are raped and massacred, tribals who are turfed out of
century old habitats, peasants whose lands are taken over for car factories,
minorities who are bludgeoned into paranoia – these, and many others, know that
something is grossly wrong. The system does not work, the system is cruel, the
system is unjust, the system exists to only serve those who run it. Crucially,
what we, the elite, need to understand is that most of us are complicit in the
system. In fact, chances are the more we have – of privilege and money – the
more invested we are in the shoring up of an unfair state.
It is time each one of us understood that at the heart of every
society is its politics. If the politics is third-rate, the condition of the
society will be no better. For too many decades now the elite of India has
washed its hands off the country’s politics. Entire generations have grown up
viewing it as a distasteful activity. In an astonishing perversion, the finest
imaginative act of the last thousand years on the subcontinent, the creation and
flowering of the idea of modern India through mass politics, has for the last 40
years been rendered infra dig, déclassé, uncool. Let us blame our parents, and
let our children blame us, for not bequeathing onwards the sheer beauty of a
collective vision, collective will and collective action. In a word, politics:
which, at its best, created the wonder of a liberal and democratic idea and at
its worst, threatens to tear it down.
We stand faulted then in two ways. For turning our back on the
collective endeavour; and for our passive embrace of the status quo. This is in
equal parts due to selfish instinct and to shallow thinking. Since shining India
is basically only about us getting an even greater share of the pie we have been
happy to buy its half-truths and look away from the rest of the sordid story.
Like all elites, historically, that have presided over the decline of their
societies, we focus too much of our energy on acquiring and consuming and too
little on thinking and decoding. Egged on by a helium media, we exhaust
ourselves through paroxysms over vacant celebrities and trivia, quite happy not
to see what might cause us discomfort.
For years it has been evident that we are a society being
systematically hollowed out by inequality, corruption, bigotry and lack of
justice. The planks of public discourse have increasingly been divisive,
widening the fault lines of caste, language, religion, class, community and
region. As the elite of the most complex society in the world, we have failed to
see that we are ratcheted into an intricate framework, full of causal links,
where one wrong word begets another, one horrific event leads to another. Where
one man’s misery will eventually trigger another’s.
Let’s track one causal chain. The Congress creates Jarnail Singh
Bhindranwale to neutralise the Akalis; Bhindranwale creates terrorism; Indira
Gandhi moves against terrorism; terrorism assassinates Indira Gandhi; blameless
Sikhs are slaughtered in Delhi; in the course of a decade numberless innocents,
militants and security men die. Let’s track another. The BJP takes out an
inflammatory rath yatra; inflamed kar sevaks pull down the Babri
Masjid; riots ensue; vengeful Muslims trigger Mumbai blasts; 10 years later a
bogie of kar sevaks is burnt in Gujarat; in the next week 2,000 Muslims
are slaughtered; six years later retaliatory violence continues. Let’s track one
more. In the early 1940s, in the midst of the freedom movement, patrician
Muslims demand a separate homeland; Mahatma Gandhi opposes it; the British
support it; partition ensues; a million people are slaughtered; four wars
follow; two countries drain each other through rhetoric and poison; nuclear
arsenals are built; hotels in Mumbai are attacked.
In each of these rough causal chains, there is one thing in
common. Their origin in the decisions of the elite. Interlaced with numberless
lines of potential divisiveness, the India framework is highly delicate and
complicated. It is critical for the elite to understand the framework and its
role in it. The elite has its hands on the levers of capital, influence and
privilege. It can fix the framework. It has much to give and it must give
generously. The mass, with nothing in its hands, nothing to give, can, out of
frustration and anger, only pull it all down. And when the volcano blows, rich
and poor burn alike.
And so what should we be doing? Well, screaming at politicians
is certainly not political engagement. And airy socialites demanding the carpet
bombing of Pakistan and the boycott of taxes are plain absurd, just another neon
sign advertising shallow thought. It’s the kind of dumb public theatre the media
ought to deftly sidestep rather than showcase. The world is already over-shrill
with animus: we need to tone it down, not add to it. Pakistan is itself badly
damaged by the flawed politics at its heart. It needs help, not bombing. Just
remember, when hard-boiled bureaucrats clench their teeth, little children die.
Most of the shouting of the last few days is little more than
personal catharsis through public venting. The fact is the politician has been
doing what we have been doing and as an über-Indian he has been doing it much
better. Watching out for himself, cornering maximum resource and turning away
from the challenge of the greater good.
The first thing we need to do is to square up to the truth.
Acknowledge the fact that we have made a fair shambles of the project of nation
building. Fifty million Indians doing well does not for a great India make,
given that 500 million are grovelling to survive. Sixty years after independence
it can safely be said that India’s political leadership – and the nation’s elite
– have badly let down the country’s dispossessed and wretched. If you care to
look, India today is heartbreak hotel, where infants die like flies and equal
opportunity is a cruel mirage.
Let’s be clear we are not in a crisis because the Taj hotel was
gutted. We are in a crisis because six years after 2,000 Muslims were
slaughtered in Gujarat there is still no sign of justice. This is the second
thing the elite need to understand – after the obscenity of gross inequality.
The plinth of every society – since the beginning of Man – has been set on the
notion of justice. You cannot light candles for just those of your class and
creed. You have to strike a blow for every wronged citizen.
And let no one tell us we need more laws. We need men to
implement those that we have. Today all our institutions and processes are
failing us. We have compromised each of them on their values, their robustness,
their vision and their sense of fair play. Now at every crucial juncture we
depend on random acts of individual excellence and courage to save the day.
Great systems, triumphant societies are veined with ladders of inspiration.
Electrified by those above them, men strive to do their very best. Look around.
How many constables, head constables, subinspectors would risk their lives for
the dishonest, weak men they serve who in turn serve even more compromised
masters?
I wish Rohinton had survived the lottery of death in Mumbai last
week. In an instant, he would have understood what we always went on about.
India’s crying need is not economic tinkering or social engineering. It is a
political overhaul, a political cleansing. As it once did to create a free
nation, India’s elite should start getting its hands dirty so they can get a
clean country.