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An honorable people

For the most part, Y2K began with the whimper of predictable irrelevance, and life goes on as before. The six bottles of water and few cans of chick-peas I bought on the 31st weren't protection from the bug itself, but from the possibility that my cautious neighbors might have triggered a run on the supply chains of grocery stores. The Friday-night/New Year's Eve party ended at 3 am, and feeling suitably normal for that time of the day, I returned to the den. About the only oddity was that my telephone line gave out on the 31st, but this, I am assured, is coincidence. Bell Atlantic fixed this bug in three days flat, so it must have been a trifling matter.

Amidst the cornucopia of the normal and mundane, however, an interesting facet of our nation came to the fore with the dawn of the new year -- a week after being kidnapped in the skies, 155 worn-out travellers stepped off a relief aircraft and into a familiar freedom, and as they did, we opened a new chapter in our sense of self.

The details still await investigative journalism and more transparency from the government, but loosely the facts were these. A small number of separatist terrorists seized an aircraft belonging to the Government of India, and made off with it and its passengers, first to Amritsar, then to Lahore, the Middle East, and finally to their safe haven in Afghanistan.

The safety of the passengers, they announced, was tied to the release of fellow-terrorists lodged in Indian jails. Left with little by way of real options, and having already lost one passenger to on-board brutality, the government let the prisoners and their rescuers head off into the lawless wilds of the Pak-Afghan border, presumably to return to wage war against the state once more.

Who shall we say lost? The Government of India, forced to capitulate to the hijackers' demands? The people of Kashmir, upon whom further acts of terrorism are likely to be thrust with renewed vigor? Soldiers in the armed forces, who must now wonder exactly why the loss of their own lives and limbs in hunting separatists rates a poor second to the lives of 20-something honeymooners and well-heeled businessmen? Pakistan, whose image as a sponsor of terrorism was further nailed to the barn door in large font? And who shall we say won? The Taleban, whose image among the civilized could only rise from the depths to which it has sunk? And where shall we apportion blame? With the middle class, as Amberish Diwanji claimed, or with the political leadership and the tragically amusing Crisis Management Group?

To find winners and losers from the incident might well prove an evasive task now, for the merit of today's choices and actions is often to be judged in the light of their impact in the years ahead. If a vengeful state vigorously eliminates the perpetrators of this crime as well as their fellow militiamen in Kashmir and elsewhere, we might look back on it and contend that the incident shook the government, bringing forth a desirable hardness.

On the other hand, if the successful attempt at blackmailing the nation calls more jihadists to the cause of Kashmiri secession, we might acquire a different view, lamenting the apathy of the State. Of these, only time will sift the winner from the loser, and only if there is to be one; for it is even possible that the inertial indifference of the government and the resolute dogma of the terrorist will both survive the hijacking more or less unaltered.

Let us, therefore, look beyond the particulars of the event, and ask ourselves if there was anything about the incident and its immediate aftermath that will last beyond the days when it is still news. To do that, we must don a different hat, one that sees ourselves not as citizens of India grappling with internal problems, but as a collective people espousing a notion of ourselves to the world beyond our boundaries. Clad in this new image, we might see that in the midst of a difficult week, as we wrestled with alternative potential responses to the hijacking, a series of small images flashed before our eyes.

We began to see, the power of our influential classes, and to denounce a mindless concern for their own, even while they show little regard for a thousand unprivileged groups. We began to see a nation collectively under attack from well-armed and unrelenting terrorism, and to think that our responses bind us together, even if we don't suffer equally from the mishaps thrust upon us.

We began to see that in a world of interlocked ideologies, the threat to security extends far beyond our gaze, to America and much of the free world allied with her as well. And in the midst of these images, we solidified in ourselves a simple notion that in the years to come will become a cornerstone of our position in the world. Much like the denizens of any nation awakening to a new destiny and the scent of opportunities around the world, we began to see ourselves as an honorable people.

Terrorism, we now remind the world, is an affront not merely to India, but to civilization itself. The war that is being waged against us, we aver, is not a matter of internal strife, for the Kashmiri would never desert us and choose instead the mindless ruin of religious oppression at the hands of gun-toting fanatics. Instead, it is a matter of international concern, with the powerful extremism of Islam on one side, and free societies on the other. Muslim majority is not an issue in our constitutionally secular land, we insist, for tolerance is deemed a virtue by many, and Indianness rests not in one's faith but in an undying love for the motherland and her ways.

It is in these notions of our self that the universalism of our culture is transformed into the rubber that hits the road to the rest of the world. The premise to the transformation is this -- that our ideas of social organization are applicable not merely within our borders, but far beyond them as well. Much as the United States touts the American ideal around the planet, and in the well-recorded and much-maligned tradition of all powers past, we have begun to assert not merely that the solutions we might find to social and economic problems are unique, but that their universal adoption would be a wonderful thing.

For many centuries, we have remained the great exception to the world, a people of immense diversity without a purposeful togetherness, merely possessing a universal view without seeking new homes for our uniquely Indian ideas. But, in a world increasingly locked in embrace with the notion that individual freedom and entrepreneurship are the true pillars of social and economic progress, we find, to our amusement and advantage, that what we have always professed to believe is now in vogue.

For, into the new world order we have unwittingly brought the largest collection of the planet's free people, and a newly opening economy. We couldn't have wished for a better state of global affairs if we'd planned it.

That must be why the affirmation of our honorable intentions seems genuine to us, for it reflects the world around us fairly. It is just as well, for the views we express to the world outside our territory often become bases for our own society. In the coming years, we will confront a diminishing federalism curiously aligned with growing nationalism, a universal view of opportunities and respect startlingly at odds with widespread disparity within the nation, and enlightened lamas and impoverished Muslims alike seeking entry at the door.

The coupling of these realities will shape India for better or worse, but whatever the outcome, it will at least be true that increasingly, we will reassure ourselves that we are an honorable people. The challenge will be to ensure that this is more than the inevitable dawn of a new colonialism.

Ashwin Mahesh