Right now, I'm reading "India After Gandhi" by Ramachandra Guha, a book which describes itself as "The History of the World's Largest Democracy". Guha is clear, concise, chooses his quotations well and overall the book so far has been enjoyable. However, I do wonder if a person with absolutely no interest or knowledge of Indian history and present would find it as compelling as I am currently finding it. I am trying to imagine myself reading the post-colonial history of say, Namibia or Argentina and wondering if I will like it. I'm not sure if I will.
It's interesting to note from the book that so many of the "recent" questions and ideological positions taken up by various people are actually just unanswered and unresolved questions from independence and partition. In fact, if the three main (to my knowledge) movers of India's intellectual space (the Congress, the Left and the Right) of 1952 were taken and thrown into a newsroom with a shouting Arnab Goswami or a subtly partisan Burkha Dutt, they would seem out of place for their manner perhaps, but certainly not their content. The lines have been drawn 70 years back, the shots being fired across the lines are the same. The characters are different. The successes of each side have varied.
Guha absolves Nehru of the charge that he was the main proponent of the Socialist system soon after Independence. It was, says Guha, the Indian industrialists of the time who proposed what came to be known as the 'Bombay Plan', a plan whose spirit the budgets of newly independent India would heavily borrow from. As I read this, there was a voice at the back of my head that was extremely cynical of this due to all the renewed debate about Nehru's steering of the early economy. 'Ha, you commie!' it said. 'You Congress apologist. Nehru ruined India, haven't you heard?'
I read on.
There was a rather evocative section that, frankly, gave me goosebumps. Guha describes the building of a dam (a temple of Modern India, according to Nehru), how water flowed to villages that had never seen flowing water. Firecrackers were burst, he says, all along the 150 mile path of a new canal that was fast filling up with water. Heart-rending. Then this voice again assailed my mind. 'Ha, what temple?' it said. 'Dams flood huge areas of land, displacing marginalised sections of the society such as adivasis and destroy the ecology. Typical capitalist, just praising the damn dam.'
You see, I don't know whether it's the issue with me and my general politically mostly aware, reading newspaper a lot, nature. Or whether this is the nature of growing up. I couldn't just take it for granted that a great figure of the Indian freedom struggle and a towering figure in international diplomacy had great ambitions for his and my country and steered it ably on the best course. I couldn't just enjoy the beautiful description of the feat of an entire river being diverted into the path of a dry village. I had to think of the caveats. The costs. The hidden agenda, the hidden backdrop.
It's like the first instinct on seeing a silver lining is to look for the cloud. It's like the first reaction to seeing a light in the tunnel is to listen for the roar of a train. I know those who will call this "objectivity" a virtue. But it becomes a habit. And you start doing it all the time, everywhere, even when you want to just sit back and read a book. Yes, Indian history is a most loaded subject. Every detail is bitterly contested, every man and (less often) woman has her greatness defined, redefined and refuted. Gandhi was a Mahatma. Gandhi was a pedophile and fraud. Nehru was a charismatic and visionary leader. Nehru was an anglophile elitist who hid behind his charisma to get what he wanted.
With learning more about politics and ideologies, it has become difficult for me to read about my beloved country and just enjoy the journey, from a British colony in a wretched state to swatantra, and then swaraj with democracy in a much much much less wretched state.
I wish I could switch on my objectivity for news and doing my 5th year project and switch it off for daily life.