Let us light the candles of understanding in the country

Keki Daruwalla

I remember fondly a Jamaican poet, Lorna Goodison, with whom I read at Erlangen in Germany in 1989. Erlangen is a beautiful Huguenot town, kept exactly as it was 200 years earlier. That is called respect for tradition, unlike what we are doing to the Central Vista, all to perpetuate one man’s name. I was so impressed with the way she read — eyes closed and face and body trance-bound, that I went again to her reading on the South Bank in London. But the one poem on compassion that stuck in my memory was about ‘lighting the candles of understanding’. The first lines go like this: “I shall light a candle of understanding in thine heart which shall not be put out.” I have been ruminating for the last few years that the establishment in our country has let us down here. If there’s one thing in the nation’s heart that the government and party in power have assiduously tried to scotch, snuff out, smother (forgive my use of three words instead of one), it is the forlorn candles of understanding.

Why? To give a simplistic answer, (who can decipher the labyrinthine workings of an RSS mind?) because of adherence to the so-called ideology ingrained in (a) Hindutva, and (b) the Jana Sangh narrative. So, when the lockdown started, the party forgot the lakhs of migrants — stuck jobless, without food, shelter or work. They had been too busy fulfilling promises, Article 370 here and locking up the Abdullahs there, and solving the Kashmir problem, common civil code (triple talaq is a milder version of that), etc.

A very tricky question comes up in my very primitive mind. Mr Amit Shah and Ms Mamata Banerjee, as all of us know, can’t see eye to eye on most issues. Suppose the Home Ministry (MHA) gets a Bill passed in Parliament turning West Bengal into a Union Territory? Why not? Will consult some constitutional expert shortly, Mr Swapan Dasgupta or Mr Subramanian Swamy.

Lighting a candle is a gesture. I lit five of them when Mr Modi asked us to do so at 9 pm the other day. The leader asks, you follow. But what gesture has the government or party come out with before or after the outbreak of the coronavirus? Has it tried to even drop some harsh measure from the CAA or the NPR, struck the colonial Sedition Act off the law books? Some gesture towards J&K, say freeing Mehbooba Mufti, after keeping her in custody for eight months. There is no let-up in the assaults from Pakistani jihadis. The sad news has come in that a brave Colonel, a Major and three others have been killed in an encounter in Handwara. Has anything changed? The same infiltrators, and the same bravehearts dying. So what was the whole operation in honour of? Nearer home, has any police official, guilty of high-handedness in JNU or Jamia, been punished? Remember wearing masks, a number of goons had beaten up the JNU students. Who were these people who were given a carte blanche by the police? Have any of them been identified? Is there a semblance of a thaw anywhere from the side of the MHA or the police? None, Brutus, none. Then none have they offended.

Mehbooba Mufti, former Chief Minister of Jammu and Kashmir, has been in detention since August 5. Unaccountably, she was on February 5 placed under the far more stringent Public Safety Act. So were the Abdullahs. Then they were freed. You can apply any law, and then release the man, and nobody questions you? As a gesture, couldn’t she have been freed? Has there been any gesture whatever from the government? Can the government justify the detention of the Abdullahs?

The rustic unread Tablighi Jamaat has given the rightist communal element a good handle. Many people believe they deliberately did this to block the fight against the virus, and have coined the phrase ‘corona jihad’. Not a word from the MHA to counter this. And there is no let-up in the smashing up and mashing up of Delhi. In this terrible economic slowdown all over the world, we are fine with spending Rs20,000 crores on using the hammer on a near 100-year-old vista, and destroying certain buildings, constructing another Parliament House and a residence for the Prime Minister.

A friend has reminded me that there was not a single statement by the Prime Minister on the communal riots in February in Delhi, not one plea or advice to the two communities to desist from violence. We were burning each other’s houses, leave alone ‘candles in their hearts’.

What about statues coming up, Shivaji in the sea and Bal Thackeray somewhere in Dadar, Mumbai? Why have we suddenly got enamored of statues? The Shivaji one, 696 feet high, will cost Rs3,643 crores. The Thackeray one just a moderate Rs2,000 crores. A measly Rs2,000 crores. This should have called for a protest by the Shiv Sena. Has any of this to do with lighting the candles of understanding amongst our diverse people?

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