ELECTIONS '98
COMMENTARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ARCHIVES

Why The Monkey Monkeys On

The phone rings and it's someone I know rather well. Speaking of tribals displaced by the Narmada Dam, because she knows I met some of them and then wrote of them here last week, she says to me: "They haven't got a chance in hell, Dilip! Nobody wants to hear them. Nobody cares about them."

Indeed. Because the latest shining sign of such indifference is upon us: the test of the Agni missile. Once more, India paints it in feet-high letters -- that we have no interest in our people. Once more, an entirely cynical and discredited political class shows how utterly removed it has become from what India is and must be. That's what this person on the phone was getting at. Those miserable thousands from the Narmada Valley can yell and march all they want. They have never been heard and they will never be heard by those who, unfortunately, matter in this country. Because those who, unfortunately, matter in this country are misty-eyed about missiles and bombs.

Soon after Pokhran, my friend Kannan Srinivasan's eponymous "Newsletter" contained this paragraph: "Every inhabitant of this subcontinent [now] feels a certain awe for the BJP government. It is the very respect with which one treats a monkey with a loaded shotgun. Nothing one does should cause the least alarm: it has great potential for damage."

Well, the monkey just got himself a new toy. I cannot wait to see the gung-ho brigade get up and prance around in exhilaration. The poor guys, they've had to endure a full 11 months without much of a chance to do it: May 11, 1998 to April 11, 1999. In that time, some of the enthusiasm must certainly have evaporated. Well, now they can finally ratchet it up again. Difficult to top nuclear bombs, I know, but launching a missile must certainly rank close. Time to distribute the sweets, to feel proud all over again about being Indian!

Or do I detect a certain jadedness, a little slackening in the tempo, a beat missing here and there? Could it be that even the gung-ho gang is gung-hoed out, even the hawks are getting weary of hawking?

Last year, they told us that we had to have the security of bombs, that we needed to "lock our front door." This security comes before all else, we learned, even food ("It is better to make sure that we are alive first and then worry about food" was only one of many dozen memorable phrases I heard at the time). After all, if we can't protect ourselves, we have no nation to speak of. So we got the bombs. Our security has become impregnable, they said. Nobody will dare threaten us now, they said.

So fine. Quicksand logic, but fine. Security impregnable as of May 11, 1998, perhaps we might have turned to the "all else." Perhaps a nation could hope that its poet-become-PM would call a press conference to announce to a stunned world his government's daring new commitment: to educating all Indians. He would set out a detailed, monitored, timebound programme to fulfil that commitment; set off a thrust of energy and action that would be visible to all, driven by the same zeal that characterises nuclear bombs and Agni missile tests.

For a start, they might have got going on Bombay's school system. The municipality here runs 2,213 primary schools (1994); they give an education of some kind to over 700,000 kids. But only two days after the glory of Agni, a Times of India reporter quotes the municipality education officer's estimate that 75,000 to 80,000 such kids -- well over ten per cent of the total -- are out of school. Many of them are out because there are areas of the city where schools are too far away for their students to reach. The same reporter quotes 12-year-old Manju Vadraj: "I had to travel for more than an hour every day, crossing railway tracks and the highway, to get to school." Unable to cope with that struggle, she has quit school.

If this is the situation in Bombay, what might it be in rural India, where 3 of every 4 Indians live? What might it be in Orissa, from where Agni shot into the sky? Of course widespread illiteracy is a vast problem that will need years to root out. Still, A B Vajpayee might have set us on the road to solving it, rather than turning shamefacedly away like every other leader does. That would have been the bomb's true peace dividend, and just one possibility of many.

Corny hopes, of course. In eleven months, Vajpayee and his magnificent men have not done one damned thing on those lines. We think we locked the front door, but the mess that front door locks in remains untouched. The mess we are all privileged to live in.

And now Agni has scudded into the sky, or the sea, or Poes Garden, or wherever it went. Take a listen to the language we heard afterwards. From Vajpayee: "Yes, we will stand on our own feet", and: "This is a purely defensive step." George Fernandes supplemented his boss with ringing words of his own: "No one can threaten us," and "no one can put pressure on us when we take steps to see that the nation's security concerns are taken care of."

Deja vu all over again, Yogi Berra would have said. For this is a verbatim replay, or near enough, of the stuff we were fed last May. So what are these, the first two in a series? Will we have some test or the other every 11 months, bathed in the same bluster about security and no one threatening us that we have heard twice already? (Question: who threatened us in these 11 months?)

Will we live to hear George, or Atal B, or someone else among their coalition colleagues, say: "Yes, we will stand on our own feet; no on can put pressure on us when we take steps to see that the nation's education concerns are taken care of?" Are such things of any interest to Vajpayee, Fernandes and the gung-ho dudes? Or are they just the naivete that meddlesome peaceniks are notorious for, naivete safely ignored?

And while on those replays of what was said 11 months ago, consider something else that's seeing a reprise today: the Jayalalitha effect.

A prime minister and his government flounder at the whims of the lady from Tamil Nadu. She makes demands by the bucketful, insists that the government jump to her off-key tune. She holds imperious court in Madras and expects the likes of Fernandes himself to twiddle his thumbs there. She stays busy whipping the government into every possible tactic to subvert the cases of massive corruption she is under trial for. She keeps making dark noises about bringing the government crashing down.

You tell me, am I referring to May last year or to April this year?

That May, Vajpayee shut the lady up for a while with his nuclear tests. "Domestic political considerations," Vajpayee wrote to Bill Clinton, made those tests necessary. This year, it's Agni. The missile test, an anonymous-by-request BJP minister told the press, will "expose" the AIADMK. It gives Vajpayee the strength to stand up to Jayalalitha that, curiously, he seems to believe he lacks. Painfully aware that she holds his government squarely in those meaty hands, he can come up with no better way to loosen her grip than bombs and missiles. "No one can threaten us now" is stirring rhetoric for sure; sadly, it is really aimed at a cannonball called Jayalalitha.

So yes, marching Narmada oustees simply have no chance, as kids looking for an education in our cities have no chance. Because in the end, these brave hawks are no more than wimps. They were proud, they announced endlessly, to be India's only government that found the "guts" to conduct nuclear tests. The truth is that they lack the stomach for the real task: building a strong, flourishing India. They don't have the inclination, the vision or the gumption for that.

That's why they distract us with bombs and renamed airports and missiles. That's why the monkey just monkeys on.

Dilip D'Souza