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FIFTH
COLUMN
Museworthy
Serious
introspection will tell Vajpayee why India remains in the doldrums
By
Tavleen
Singh
Let's
call this piece musings from Goa. If the prime minister can muse in Kumarakom
as his "eyes feast on the verdant environs of Kumarakom resort on
the banks of the sea-sized Vembanad lake in Kerala", I can muse as
my eyes feast upon a Goan garden by the Arabian Sea. It lends itself to
musing, filled as it is with sunshine, the scent of frangipani and magnolia
and the sound of waves crashing against beaches covered in holiday-makers.
Most of them are Indian. They come from all sections of that vast middle
class that our political leaders pretend not to notice as they mouth their
pretended support for "the poor". There are doctors, lawyers,
journalists, shopkeepers and businessmen and the last thing on their minds
as 2001 crept in were issues like Ayodhya and Kashmir.
Goa's prosperity
makes you think of other things. As I wandered through lovely villages
filled with modern shops, fancy restaurants and hotels of all stars and
sizes I remembered that 20 years ago these villages were as dirty and
poor as the rest of rural India. If they are prosperous little towns today
it is entirely due to tourism. I found myself musing about the thousands
of other places in India that could be similarly transformed and the only
help required from the Government is basic infrastructure: roads, electricity,
clean water. The people usually manage to do the rest. I mused over the
irony that some of the most beautiful states in India are among its poorest-Orissa,
Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. They are poor mainly because we have leaders
who continue to distract our attention from development by concentrating
on issues like Ayodhya and Kashmir. The prime minister while "musing"
in Kumarakom continues to do this and, judging by the prose that resulted
from his musings, continues to get things wrong. It surprises him that
because he announced that building a Ram temple in Ayodhya was an expression
of national sentiment he was transformed by "a section of the media
and the political class" from a moderate into a hardliner.
"Vajpayee
Unmasked, they said, conveniently masking the fact that my long stint
in public life is an open book. Worse still, a campaign was launched to
create misgivings about me in the minds of our minority brethren."
This happened,
dear prime minister, because the word Ayodhya evokes in our "minority
brethren" memories of violence, hatred and fear. It can hardly be
otherwise since they remember well the riots and killings that resulted
from your party's last attempt to build the temple. Can you blame them
for fearing that your remark about "national sentiment" might
encourage outfits like the Bajrang Dal and the VHP to once again go for
the Muslims? If you muse upon Ayodhya a little longer you may understand
their fears and also realise that solutions to complex problems do not
come through loose statements but by careful processes.
Muse then
carefully upon the Kashmir problem and you may discover that it is not
as you seem to believe "an unfortunate inheritance from the tragic
partition of India in 1947". That historical problem could well have
been over if certain Indian leaders had not chosen to deliberately meddle
with democracy in Kashmir. Remember the dismissal of Farooq Abdullah's
legitimately elected government in 1983? This may seem like a small blip
in states that have enjoyed the right to elect their own governments since
1947 but it was no small thing in Kashmir, a state that has never enjoyed
the right to fair elections. As I muse in my Goan garden I puzzle over
why a BJP prime minister finds it so hard to disown mistakes made by Congress
prime ministers. You say that, "In our search for a lasting solution
to the Kashmir problem, both in its external and internal dimensions,
we shall not traverse solely on the beaten track of the past." Alas,
you have not taken one step so far off that beaten track but simply gone
ahead with exactly the same policies that created the problem in the first
place.
To get off
the beaten track you have to start by acknowledging the mistakes of the
past and then make a serious effort to not repeat them. Had this been
done our security forces would not have hunted down innocent villagers
and shot them as foreign mercenaries after the massacre of Sikhs in Chittisinghpora
last year. And you would certainly not have allowed your home minister
to announce proudly that the "killers" were dead. Did he apologise
when the "killers" turned out to be innocent villagers? No,
his security forces shot at an unarmed procession protesting against the
killings and 12 more people were killed. You blame Pakistan for the violence
but are we really completely blameless?
So, muse
a bit longer Mr Prime Minister and ask yourself why Kerala and Goa prosper
while the rest of our beautiful country suffers due to badly handled political
problems.
Top
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METRO TODAY
As
the Government brings in more people and mops more money in taxes, it
must be seen to be rewarding those who come forth and pay up, writes India
Today Associate Editor V. Shankar Aiyar in 
