Giving INDIA a Voice Amid the Shifting Political Landscape

At long last, a no-confidence motion was moved against the incumbent government by the opposition. Given the brute majority the present government enjoys in parliament, no one expected it to go through. But it was what the writer Nadine Gordimer once called, an essential gesture”of a group acting as advocates of the national interest. The short opening speech by a young parliamentarian from the area, Gaurav Gogoi, underscored the urgency of restoring peace in Manipur, recounting the grim and brutal series of events that have been taking place there. It was a moving speech delivered without histrionics.

The home minister speaking on behalf of his party and ministry, later spoke for almost two hours. His words underscored the strength and superiority of the government over the previous Congress governments’ divisive policies, which had led to the current mess. 'We are handling it' was the message, and soon there will be peace. No more needs to be said. The speech set the stage for the prime minister’s sharp rejoinder the next day. He lashed out at the movers of the motion as expected, bristling with sarcasm and contempt for the new united opposition and its new name INDIA.

Modi ji has a wonderful ear for catching and reproducing various nuances of Hindi. As always he was many-voiced, frequently inserting local words or religious references to underscore his own deep and personal ‘connection’ with the peoples’ mind. He largely skirted around the issue of Manipur, referring to it towards the end as a matter where the nation stood with the people of Manipur.

In between the two stalwarts, Rahul Gandhi spoke for a little over 30 minutes. The government-owned TV showed him for only a few of those focusing mostly on the impassive face of the Chair. But his message was straight and simple and was heard and watched by the nation.

It feels strange to return from such oratorial performance by the prime minister to Gandhi’s. Of course the latter’s Hindi and the manner of speaking have improved vastly over the last few years, but it is still nowhere close to Modi ji’s. Even so he has an advantage. He can put his natural amiability to good use for striking a dialogue with the common Indians he met during his recent padyatra and more recently a two-day visit to Manipur. It was the pain, the hopes and the longings of the peoples of India, in particular Manipur, that he had gathered that gave a certain poignancy to his slightly different and unstructured Hindi.

In contrast to Modi and Shah’s chaste Sanskritised Hindi, Gandhi speaks a hybridized Hindi most young Indians speak today. He put the facts he had seen and gathered himself before his countrymen and women without sarcasm or cynicism. Despite his semantic limitations, the man managed to convey the pain of all communities in the beleaguered area, especially the women who are forced to live in refugee camps in their own state. Even to the most cynical members of the audience, the incidents he recounted and the conclusions he drew seemed far more gut-wrenching than the precise data put out later at length by the home minister.

India – a constantly evolving dream of unification

Gandhi’s speech had a strange reflective quality. 'What is India?' he asked rhetorically. How truly inclusive is the India of our dreams today where the Kukis and the Meiteis, the Hindus and the Muslims, the state police and the Army stand snarling at each other? These tendencies are not just limited to Manipur but have alarmingly crept up and revealed themselves in far away Nuh and also the trifurcated Kashmir.

His anguished words alleging that the ruling party instead of putting out fires was spraying inflammable material and throwing in a match to ignite communal fires, drew an uproar of protest from the ranks of the saffron party. Gandhi continued unphased. His references to his own mother and Bharat Mata (since expunged from records) reminded one of Obama’s poignant reference in his autobiography to someone raised by a single parent :

"Even as that spell was broken and the world... they had left behind, reclaimed each...I occupied the space where their dreams had been”.

In referring to his birth mother or Bharat Mata, Gandhi spoke not of his personal inheritance but of a collective dream space the generation of Midnight’s Children had begin to shape and reshape for their children. India of the 1980s was changing fast with travel and the Internet and inter-community relationships becoming commonplace like never before.

When your own personal ethnic multiplicity is evident, as with Rahul Gandhi and many other Indians of his generation and the generations that follow, India emerges as a constantly evolving dream of unification – creating a peaceful and just democratic space for all.

For Gandhi and the INDIA bloc to occupy the space they are demanding is to be really free to re-enter a collective dream. The fast-disappearing dream of which Nehru spoke on the banks of the Ravi as he unfurled the tricolor on August 15, 1947. Seventy-five years later, the world our young occupy gives them or us with no choice but to mix languages, communicate and travel globally, riding the social media flowing around us in many languages. But hello, your mother remains your mother and so also your mother tongue! Why use sophistry to stigmatise the mixed lineage and cultural adaptability patriotism of the young, sneeringly?

Those demanding one nation, one national language, one civil code – who rage in the social media, in newspaper columns, in election speeches against racial mixing, against love marriages, against women not keeping to their assigned space in a male-dominated world – are liars.

Most have sent their own progeny abroad for higher studies even as they demand vernacular-based education for all Indians. They post photos of their children on graduation day with the mortar board hats but back home demand women dress in proper clothes, not torn jeans or skirts. They have long been waiting, obsessively, to see Sonia Gandhi’s mask of a traditional Indian woman slip. It hasn’t happened but they worry when they hear Gandhi speaking this way about his mother and Bharat Mata in the same breath.

In this post-globalised world, seeking new international alliances and creating new workflow systems, India’s hybridisation and connectivity needs are undeniable. Given how often any prime minister must travel abroad with his ministers to showcase his nation as an attractive investment destination, can Gandhi’s interactions be made to look threatening in 2024?

The bigger fear is that Gandhi has taken to marching through the country and could become a witness-turned-participant in a sudden upheaval. By next year, his anger may begin resonating with the majority of the officially young. If a man in his early 50s, born of a mixed parentage with no family baggage of his own, begins to attract attention all through this diverse country by walking around, who knows he may go on to reveal some terrible unseen landmines?

India as a democracy is finally approaching a point in history where our basic identity remains rooted in the dream space created by the likes of Ambedkar, Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, and Maulana Azad. It's time to think if we appreciate hybridised languages, voices and multiple sensibilities in our artists, why shouldn't we appreciate these very qualities in our politicians?

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