JOIN USIn this pandemic-afflicted annus horribilis, three other ideas have plagued the republic. These are, the status of Uttar Pradesh (UP) as our largest state, Delhi as our capital, and making Hindi our lingua franca. All three are legacy matters the republic is unable to resolve, era after era. Such funk magnifies an unutterable truth about being Indian: That we have an ongoing capacity to accept inequality; a masochistic tolerance for maltreatment from the government or by linguistic majorities; and a proclivity to look askance at the record of India’s largest state.
With each passing week, UP renews its commitment to its own wretchedness. It piles up caste, class, religious, or gender-linked violence -- a blot not just on India but on human civilisation. Scarred, wrecked societies and communities produce state administrations that believe “illegal” conversions are so widespread that they need combating with legal teeth. Their legislatures pass “love jihad” laws. Their societies offer up a Hathras every other day.
In a recent one-day game between Australia and India at Sydney, an Indian spectator proposed to his Australian girlfriend. TV cameras caught it; it circulated on Twitter. One Twitter commentator quipped in Hindi, “Even I would have proposed in Australia. Real thing is, if the guy could do it in a UP stadium.” When questioned over this past and present, northerners are quick to defend the Indo-Gangetic plains and how they symbolise Hindu-Muslim confluence. If anything, UP confirms the failure of both faiths to foster a humane ethos. Many parts of UP have asked to break away. At one level, UP colonises the Union, and at another, oppresses its own distant regions.
Contemporary South Asian capitals have better to marginally better living conditions than Delhi. None of the other countries are as powerful as India. Despite its many changes, Delhi ushers in feudalism into the 21st century. With its toxic air, crime, insecurity, power outages, poor public services, and its straightforward class divides, Delhi exemplifies most of India’s failings. Pendulating like a yoyo between the forces of the Centre and the state, it tells Indians, “You can’t even get your national capital right.”
What a mess. Delhi, like UP, presents a picture of psychic damage. These societies cry out for healing and convalescence. (It includes nearby Bihar that went to polls in November. From what this viewer followed, there wasn’t much mention about the encephalitis-related children’s deaths that occurred 18 months ago and rattled India. In these pandemic times, was it forgotten? Those deaths showed Bihar the mirror – which it shows to itself every other day. Then, the Nitish Kumar government was questioned. Nothing much happened. Those deaths weren’t recalled much in the polls. The folks of the Indo-Gangetic plains are like that. They forgive everything. They’re inured to karma.)
Hindi, with its status in our national ethos, completes the trio of disasters. How much national time have we wasted on it, instead of embracing English and powering its reach deep into our society. To make and show English as our own language. We saw Hindi being slipped in once more into the National Education Policy 2020 recommendations. For regions that don’t speak Hindi, it seems more an instrument of oppression than English during colonialism. Is the English of the past a colonial bequest or is today’s Hindi the actual one?
In the early 1960s, V S Naipaul wrote in An Area of Darkness: “It is well that Indians are unable to look at their country directly, for the distress they would see would drive them mad...It is better to retreat into fantasy, to trust to the stars in which the fortunes of all are written.” In many ways, UP, Delhi and Hindi present a toxic triad that atrophies India each day. If things continue in this vein, in the coming years, a new North vs South or North vs Rest of India culture war looks set to brew.
(The Jindal Global University academic believes we are living through the apocalypse @RaJayaram)