Commentary/Dilip D'Souza

1997: Getting Better All The Time

Idon't know about you, but I am heartily sick of reading the obligatory year-end columns that pop up all over the place around this time of year. Even, I must admit, one I was responsible for. A New Year is for hope -- hold that laughter, you cynics -- not either misguided nostalgia or pointless despair. For looking ahead, not for reliving moments nearly always better forgotten.

But about the only looking ahead to 1997 that I've seen over the last few days has come from astrologers, whose continuing ability to get themselves taken seriously is certainly one of the greatest wool-over-the-eyes acts, not just of 1996, but of all time. Their learned discourses apart, can you think of any other glances forward to 1997?

I couldn't either, which is why I decided to write one for myself. Here are just a few of the things -- nothing momentous, just ordinary things -- that I think will happen in 1997. Though you may want to let me know, after reading this, if 'hope' is a better word than 'think' in that last sentence.

Sometime in the new year, we will laugh out loud at people like one Mangal Prabhat Lodha, member of the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly from the Bharatiya Janata Party representing a Bombay constituency. In late December, Lodha introduced a Bill in the assembly that would make religious conversions illegal.

Speaking about it, he complained that Christian missionaries were busy converting 100,000 Maharashtrian Hindus 'by various means including allurements and force.' He went on: 'First conversion from a religion to another takes place and then the change in the converted person's nationalism inevitably follows.' His masterpiece of legislation is called, if you please, the 'Freedom of Religion' Bill.

In 1997, I'm thinking, we'll remember that Hindus have no monopoly on nationalism. Nor have Christians or Muslims or Parsis a monopoly on being anti-national. I don't much care who gets converted to what -- in fact, I'd be happy if everybody gave up religion altogether. But this easy connection that the Lodhas make -- if you're non-Hindu, you're somehow not Indian -- strikes at the very moorings of our country. So who's to say who's Indian and who's not?

I don't expect Lodha will ever understand all this, but sometime in 1997, the rest of us will laugh him off his self-righteous pedestal. We'll ridicule the men who try to equate religion with what they proclaim is nationalism.

Then there are the guys who, wanting to show the world just how Indian they really are, lose themselves in trivialities. Like a man I know who refuses to shake a hand offered in greeting: he withdraws and folds his hands in a very correct namaste instead. Like two people who write to me -- one from the spiffiest address in Bombay, another from the heart of Silicon Valley in the USA -- sprinkling their letters with 'Shri' (not 'Mr') and 'Namaste' and 'Pranam' (certainly not 'Greetings'); never do they write 'India', it's invariably 'Bharat.'

All of which is fine, gentlemen, but none of which makes you more or less Indian than anyone else. You're going to find that out in 1997.

Going back to religion. Walking up the stairs to my second floor office the other day, I passed a man who was very carefully inserting little bulbs into a long string of sockets on the wall. The string led into an office of the Life Insurance Corporation (the public sector guardian of millions of Indian lives) on the first floor, where there was an unusual amount of activity. Music was blasting and the employees were all there in shiny new clothes.

This was unusual not because of the music. Nor the clothes. Like most of them, this LIC office never has more than half of its desks occupied. Those occupants are frequently either listening to the radio or drinking tea or just asleep. This day, they were celebrating a Satyanarayana Mahapuja, a religious ritual that public sector employees, egged on by political aspirants, seem the most fervent about observing. They were doing so on the time that I pay them for, in premises I pay for them to use. This was what had galvanised the office into 100 per cent attendance.

Now I always feel confident that a time will come when we will recognise the need to keep religion distinct, and preferably distant, from work. Perhaps then, LIC employees will understand that doing a conscientious day's work is a far greater tribute to the Gods than any Mahapuja can be. That time hasn't come yet. In 1997?

Mahapujas must seem an obscene luxury in the five districts in the eastern state of Orissa which staggered under a dreadful drought in late 1996. Malaria and malnutrition are already rampant in that state; over 80 per cent of the people in these areas have sunk below the poverty line. The drought added a whole new dimension to their suffering. Wells are running dry as the groundwater level has dropped; whole crops have failed; hundreds of men, women and children have died needlessly.

It's a story that doesn't even need telling: droughts have been routine happenings in India, and especially in Orissa, for centuries. The terrible irony is that just miles down the coast, coastal Andhra Pradesh was devastated by a cyclone and severe flooding at the same time as the drought in Orissa.

But the real tragedy in Orissa is that the drought is seen as routine. Last year it was eastern Maharashtra, this year Orissa, so what? It's both tragic and galling that, going into our 50th year, we think it acceptable that whole belts of our country are so deprived of water supplies that a failure of one monsoon devastates thousands of lives. That we allow those who rule us to pay attention to religious conversions, or M F Husain, or Michael Jackson, or renaming cities -- all this, instead of getting on towards simple goals: ensure all Indians have access to drinking water all the time. Make our people less nakedly vulnerable to droughts.

And yes, I believe 1997 will see us demanding, from Mangal Prabhat Lodha and his political colleagues, progress towards these goals. Besides others, like education and health care. In our 50th year, we will realise that this kind of progress will be the real measure of Indian-ness.

I say this because I know one thing absolutely for sure about 1997. Because it marks 50 years since Independence, we will see a cornucopia of debate and pronouncements, through the year, about being Indian. It happens every year, but we'll get an overdose in 1997. The Lodhas and Thackerays and Mulayams will define Indian-ness in all kinds of ways, none very different from what they've managed so far, all about as destructive as before.

But in 1997, we will know what kind of reply to give them. Happy New Year!