A battered woman stays on with her husband because of the shame of having failed and the hope that things will change. We are now in a battered wife relationship with India. We bear the unbearable shame of knowing that collectively as a society we have failed and yet as human beings, we cling to the hope that things will change. Hope was after all the last box Pandora opened.
But even hope must be occasionally ameliorated, assuaged and given wings to fly. We belong to a country that refuses to learn the lessons of history. We held our breath after the Masjid Bahri mosque, we held our breath again after the Gujarat riots. Hoping against hope that such atrocities would not be repeated in our lifetime. Yet, they have only gained in momentum. Edna Fernandes writes, in her book Holy Warriors, that most of those who court the Hindutva ideology are young men. They are not the same men nursing the bitterness and pain of Partition. This is a new generation of Hindu Raj ideologues. Twenty years of prosperity has not been successful in developing a social conscience. Neither has this prosperity percolated to the ghettoized Muslim, which makes them feel more alienated. They, in turn, cling to archaic paradigms that don’t serve them well in a modern, secular world. India has shown no resolve whatsoever to deal with the contentious issue of Kashmir, an albatross hanging around our necks. Nor has she shown any will to tackle the corruption that bottle-necks and strangulates our governments into non-governance. India has become a country that robs her citizens of every ounce of their dignity and worth and gives little in return. The only reason, we still cling to her and owe it allegiance is because we haven’t yet stopped hoping nor have we stopped calling her “amma”. selma
