Mile sur mera tumhara? Not really

PIYUSH Pandey passed away on Friday, in the same week that Francesca Orsini was denied entry into India. The advertising guru, who memorably wrote the lyrics for the 5.36-minute ‘Mile Sur Mera Tumhara’ song for Doordarshan back in 1988, would have winced if he’d heard that the noted Hindi-Urdu scholar from the School of Oriental and African Studies was sent packing back to London because she had violated her visa conditions in March. Evidently, Orsini had been on a tourist visa at the time, but was still conducting research — clearly, the Ministry of Home Affairs didn’t approve of the noted multilingual historian, who has been working in India for 40 years. Perhaps, their sur didn’t meet.

Pandey will also be remembered for his Fevicol ad campaign which sent the larger-than-life message about a higgledy-piggledy nation that, nevertheless, managed to stick together through thick and thin and come up trumps.

The key phrase, here, is “stick together.” India is 78 years old and it has more or less stuck together — sometimes more, sometimes less. Depending on your ideological persuasion, we can argue about the degree to which things have been falling apart, or not.

One example of the latter is the BJP’s determination to streamline the passage of trains carrying Bihari migrant labour working in Punjab, as many as 10 lakh people, back home to celebrate the three-day Chhath Puja festival — to use an overused cliché, the BJP is leaving no stone unturned to ensure that the exercise will be smooth. It’s a smart move. Of course it is intended to sweeten the path of the BJP in both states — elections in Bihar are round the corner, soon after Chhath, and the party must hope that a feel-good train ride home will help Bihari labour decide which way to vote.

One example of the former, of course, is Francesca Orsini’s expulsion from India — what is mystifying is why, as no real reason beyond her “visa violation” has been given. Shelley Walia, a former professor at Panjab University, has eloquently made the academic freedom argument on the opposite page today, but it is noteworthy that apart from a few public intellectuals — Ramachandra Guha, Mukul Kesavan, etc — no group of lecturers, teachers or professors anywhere in the country have stood up to protest Orsini’s expulsion from Mother India.

Perhaps this growing silence is the nub of the problem. Fewer people are speaking up. Moreover, since democracies count on Opposition parties to give life to differences, disagreements and deviations — except Opposition parties these days are either folding up or becoming fantastically irrelevant — the argumentative Indian is becoming both rare and exhausted.

Perhaps the largest cloud cover these days has fallen on the debate around India’s foreign policy, and specifically, India’s US policy. US President Donald Trump hasn’t made it easier by mispronouncing the name of India’s ambassador to the US, Vinay Mohan Kwatra, who is seen standing on the right of a seated Trump at his desk in the White House as he reads out a “Happy Diwali” message. What was intended to be a congratulatory moment for India – how many heads of state, after all, have adopted your festival as theirs? — was reduced to a cringe moment of outsize proportions.

Is this, then, the moment to ask if the Modi government’s US policy has failed India? Certainly, Trump is not the easiest of leaders to make friends with – he is vain, self-centred and egotistical. But the fact of the matter is that India has dealt with vastly more problematic crises and survived.

Two examples come to mind — the first, in the aftermath of the sanctions around the 1998 nuclear tests when Bill Clinton and his government stomped all over India; India’s then ambassador to the US, Naresh Chandra, held his cool and refused to bend. Clinton came to India two years later and celebrated for five days.

The second example, less well-known, is when George W Bush overcame the strangulation of his own strategic community, with a little help from Indian ambassador Ronen Sen, to sign the nuclear deal with India. Sen deployed other forces, notably US business — many of them of Indian origin.

So why has it been downhill since Trump came back to the White House earlier this year and completely obliterated the memory of the circumambulation of the stadium in Texas along with PM Modi, while the stadium resonated with ‘Ab ki baar, Trump sarkar’?

The question has been asked many times. It was first raised when chained Indian deportees, most of them of Punjabi origin, were sent back to India — Trump was making a point about unwelcome aliens and he chose the Indians to do that. This week he has forced another embarrassment on India by getting India to reduce the amount of cheap oil it buys from Russia — the Modi government was finally forced to capitulate, after side-stepping the matter for three years since it began its oil drip.

But why has it come to this? Why has the Foreign Office failed PM Modi by not giving him the sound advice he deserves? Why has India’s foreign policy with its most important relationship, the US, become so lacklustre that it deserves a full and complete overhaul?

The problem is not about stopping the purchase of cheap oil from Russia — India has bitten its tongue before too, in 2012, when the US forced it to stop buying oil from Iran. The problem is that India has no friends left in Washington DC, with whom you can confide and cry over a cup of spilt milk and persuade it to believe that you are both on the same side. Remember when India persuaded the US to make an exception in its sanctions against Russia, for the S-400 missiles that Russia was selling India?

The problem with Naya India is that too few people are talking to each other. We don’t know why Francesca Orsini, the Hindi-Urdu historian, was deported from India — no one’s telling. We don’t know why Trump doesn’t like us anymore, although some of the smartest Americans are of Indian origin. Or why we are at cross-purposes with half our neighbourhood — Nepal, Pakistan, Bangladesh.

Mile sur mera tumhara?

Not really.