No arguments please, we’re British!
By Manohar Malgonkar

LET’S be honest. We Indians are addicts, a race hooked on, just as avid for our shots of the stuff that gives us a kick as a drunkard for rum or a dope addict for heroin. We have gone on craving for it in menacingly increasing doses.

What?

Only one guess. Got it?

Of course you did , as who wouldn’t? Politics!

Politics, politics and politics! Our newspapers are awash in it, our national TV and radio networks survive on it. We have managed to arrive at a stage of self-indulgence in it that is something of a high-water mark: a parliamentary election every year. We look upon them like annual crops, of mangoes or oranges and speak of bumper harvests. This year, 1999 promises to be a sensational year.

It is my belief that a political party which contests the elections on a platform that, if it were returned to power, it would enact legislation to made sure that the nation would get a general election every year, would win a landslide victory. It would give the people what they so obviously crave for:

A bumper harvest every year and elections both for the Parliament and the state assemblies. A permanent high; bliss! An ideal achieved.

Then what?

Then nothing. For the obvious reason that, after Utopia has been attained, there can be nothing else to ask for. We will be in a permanent state of election fever, without the instrumentality of bare-toothed political factions sabotaging tenuous alliances and indeed without the President’s directions.

Paradise. Oh well, at any rate, paradise now, to be at the boiling point year in year out, with every two-bit party in with a chance of being in the government.

But we’re not in Utopia yet. For the present we have to go on as in the past, depending on our leaders to make sure that governments don’t last beyond a year. And here is wishing strength to the elbows of our storm troopers, our Jayas and our Mayas, our nimble-footed Swamy, our interfeuding Yadavs. Long may they live!

Nevertheless, as in any society there are some who, because of their age, or upbringing, or of some congenital shortcoming, are unable to go along with the tide and are repelled by some of the realities of electioneering such as the apalling wastage of money and the levels of inter-party invective. They like to think of themselves as a ‘silent minority’, but are looked upon by the majority as soreheads, spoilsports, cranks.

But even this lot of people — among whom I class myself — can draw some comfort from the fact that, despite the buffettings to which they have been subjected over countless years, the basic values ingrained in our system have remained unimpaired. For one thing, the built-in secularism of the nation’s eponymous faith: Hinduism. It has never meant that you have to be a Hindu to be a citizen of Hindustan or that not being a Hindu debars you from holiding any office. We have had Muslims as our presidents, a Sikh, as our President.

Of how many other countries, even the most self-admiring democracies, can we say the same thing? Germany, say. Will they ever accept a Jew as their Chancellor? When, in the sixties, the Americans elected John F. Kennedy as their president, it was thought to be an instance of their maturity as a democracy that they could even tolerate a Catholic as their President. Offhand, I cannot think of British Prime Minister who was other than C of E since the days of Benjamin Disraeli, more than 100 years ago.

O.K. Some of our political leaders have called into question the propriety of Sonia Gandhi, a lady of foreign origin, being made a candidate for the office of our Prime Minister, particularly since, even after her marriage, she seemed to be in no particular hurry to become Indian. At that is it not something of a plus point for us that, even in the ongoing bare-fisted war-of-words inseparable from elections, no one has so much as raised the question of Sonia Gandhi’s religious beliefs. Does she still belong to the faith of her birth, Catholic Christianity or to Hinduism which was supposedly, her husband’s faith because Rajiv Gandhi was half-Parsi, too? Or again is she not a believer at all?

The point being that , in India, no one gets worked up over such matters: to be Indian is to be open-minded about all religions or, for that matter, no religion. That, as many people believe, is the real strength of the mainstream religion — unless it is a weakness too. Surely, Shia Muslims feel much less threatened in India than their counterparts do in Pakistan.

And did not Nehru himself, the founder of the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty, profess to be an agnostic? The same, free -and eazy attitude is evident in our readiness to grant citizenship to almost anyone who desires it. An Indian citizen finding a spouse in another land encounters little or no difficulty in making him or her an Indian citizen.

After all Sonia Gandhi’s is a unique case. She married into the nation’s ruling dynasty and that itself meant that it was she who could choose when she wanted to become an Indian citizen — it was for her to take it or not take it. My argument is that even ordinary Indians who found foreign spouses had no difficulty in getting them Indian citizenship. One of my own brothers married a Japanese girl. She merely had to apply for citizenship to be granted it.

In Britain, she would not have found it so easy. There they distrust claims from foreign women seeking citizenship on such grounds. In fact they look upon such brides as having resorted to such marriages only to make sure of British citizenship.

Britain, after all is a rich land; people from Third-World countries are desperate to be admitted to British citizenship. India, on the other hand, is itself part of the Third World — a land from which many of its people long to escape to Britain. As such there can be no comparison in the attitudes of these countries to foreigners seeking citizenship. The traffic is all one way. To make sure that their country is not innundated by immigrants, British just have be strict about letting in outsiders.

O.K. So here is more balanced comparison.

Here in India, we have this lady of foreign origins making a bid to become the country’s Prime Minister. This fact may make some of her political opponents foam at the mouth. But by and large, most citizens don’t seem to be bothered by it.

Here is the other side of the coin. Mohammad Al Fayed. A man fabulously wealthy. A man who, but for his name and origins, may qualify to be a pillar of English society. He owns four yachts, and 60 Rolls Royces. He owns that flagship Tory supershop in London, Harrods. He owns that magazine of Britishness, Punch. He is the sponsor of the Annual Royal Horse Show at which he has the privilege of sharing the Royal box with Britain’s monarch. He owns a hoary old castle in Scotland. And what can be a more authentic stamp of Britishness than the ownership of a football club, the Fulham. He pays £ 25 million in taxes every year. Across the channel, in France, he has bought the villa in which the Duke and Duchess of Windsor lived in exile and has spent £ 50 million to renovate and refurbish it. He also owns France’s most elegant hotel, the Ritz. The French, for their part, think highly of him and have rewarded him with the Legion d’Honneur.

Well, this mam, Mohammad Al Fayed, who has lived in Britain for more than 20 years. He was not making a bid to become Britain’s Prime Minister. All he was seeking was a British passport.

I quote a newpaper headline datelined Lon-don, May 7. "UK rejects Al Fayed’s plea for passport."